


The Courage of Stars

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Colonialism, Found Families, Gen, Revolution, mining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-04-28 04:39:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 81,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5078137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feuilly has lived all his life in a broken system.  In the mining colonies of the outer planets, you learn quickly: How to fix a ventilation fan with nothing but spare drill parts, how to make a single protein cake last three meals, how to expend as few precious calories as possible while chipping the iron ore from the little rock that is your home.  You learn to live with the knowledge that death is never more than a slip of a tool or a broken air scrubber away and to accept the fact that everyone you love is going to leave or be taken away from you sooner or later.  </p><p>Feuilly has learned his lessons well.  He knows that the universe is huge and cold, totally indifferent to what the tiny humans floating through it want--and that the interstellar corporations that run it are no better--and he knows better than to try to fight any of that.</p><p>But it looks like he's going to do it anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is just to say
> 
> I will post  
> content warnings  
> in the chapter notes  
> as they apply
> 
> although  
> I won't for violence and  
> death  
> to avoid spoilers
> 
> Forgive me  
> but those two are  
> fair game  
> in any chapter
> 
> With love (and credit to W.C.W.),
> 
> Fraternite (takethewatch.tumblr.com)
> 
> [But for real here's a list of things that come up at some point, in case you want to avoid any of them: Mentions of child neglect/abuse (Thenardiers), human trafficking, torture, panic attacks/anxiety, and violence.]

Feuilly was nineteen years old when he signed his life away.

He didn’t realize at the time what he was doing; later, he would wonder whether everyone who left Gideon was equally unaware or whether this was one of those things everyone knew, and he had just missed it somehow. There were a lot of people who left the moon, after all, and there were only three ways to get off: You could pay one of the merchants or mechanics a thousand credits to take you in their cargo bay (and nobody on Gideon had that kind of money); you could sell yourself to a slip ship and spend the rest of your life jumping between mining colonies to provide "human services" to the sex-starved workers there; or you could sign the bond papers, where you promised to work for Beta Caeli System Transport and Excavation Corporation until the cost of your passage to the planet's surface was paid off. Maybe all the people who signed the papers--except Feuilly--understood exactly what they were doing, and the only reason nobody talked about it was that there was nothing to discuss. There was, after all, no other way to get off the moon.

And everyone wanted to get off the moon. What was there to stay for? Generations ago, the moon colony had been marketed to the slum-dwellers of an overcrowded planet several star-systems away as "a moderate-sized moon with a temperate climate and an atmosphere whose readings indicated a high chance of the presence of copper and other precious minerals." What Gideon was in reality was an uneven chunk of worthless rock, with an ambient temperature just warm enough that you could survive without a heat source for about 2 hours, wreathed in a faint haze of unbreathable gasses.

Inside the habitation bubbles that the sponsors of the colonization expedition had dropped along with the new settlers, machinery wheezed away constantly to keep the air breathable and at a steady 55 degrees. The thousand or so people who lived in the network of hallways and pods spent their days chipping away at the rock under their feet; they'd abandoned any dreams of finding copper long ago, but the moon had enough iron and salt in it to buy the protein cakes that would keep you alive for another day of digging. Feuilly had never known anything else, of course (none of them had; it went without saying that if you lived on Gideon, you’d been born there)--but even he was aware that it was a place with a lot of difficulties and dangers, and not a lot of bright spots to outweigh them.

In the half a lifetime Feuilly had lived there, he’d seen dozens of people leave. There were the traders who stopped on Gideon just long enough to sell their air filter parts and protein cakes and replacement drill bits for whatever chunks of ore the moon’s inhabitants had managed to pry out of the ground; they usually stayed a day, maybe two, sucking on their oxygen tanks all the while, before they left for whatever moon or planet or star system was next on their circuit. There were other visitors too, occasionally--traveling medics or mechanics or service workers--but they usually glanced bleakly around the main dock, made a half-hearted attempt to coax some credits or trade goods out of people who clearly couldn’t afford to pay for anything, then took off again. Every once in a while, one of the people who lived on Gideon convinced one of these visitors to let them go with them, to give them a job mopping up blood from surgeries or crawling into the small, hot parts of their ships' engines to replace worn-out parts. More often, though, the moon’s inhabitants left in the hold of one of the Transport and Excavation Corp.’s shuttles. The shuttles came by every two hundred days or so (maybe it had always been that way, although in Feuilly’s memories of his early childhood the trader visits were much more frequent, and the TEC shuttles much rarer), and every time people would put their thumbprints on the plasticky documents and pledge the next dozen years of their lives to working for the company in exchange for the privilege of getting off the moon. It wasn’t a lot of people--just one or two every time. But when it went on year after year, it started to add up.

And in nineteen years, Feuilly had never seen anyone come to Gideon to stay.

Feuilly had made the decision weeks ago, but still he didn’t go over to the big TEC shuttle until just an hour before it was scheduled to leave. He’d watched others do the same thing--lingering in the port watching the TEC people out of the corners of their eyes, finding excuses to go back to their pods, laughing and talking a little too loud--and he’d always thought it silly. After all, everyone knew they were leaving. Why not just go?

Now that it was _him_ preparing to leave the only solid ground he’d ever known, he thought maybe he understood. It wasn't that he loved Gideon, which was just a place, and a place where he'd been hungry and cold and lonely too many nights to have strong fond feelings for. He wasn't held back by the people he'd be leaving, as much as he'd miss some of them--he knew that even if he didn't leave, _they_ would, in another year or two. What was the difference? There was nothing for him here. Still, he found it hard to actually say goodbye.

Finally, he worked up the nerve to cross the port and stood in front of the little folding desk the TEC people had brought out.

“Ready to get out of here?” the man behind the desk asked him.

Feuilly, voice suddenly gone, nodded.

The man picked up his tablet and made some motions over the screen. “Name?”

“Feuilly.”

“ID number?”

“B-C-A-E-25982011.”

“Destination?”

“Uh . . . Beta Caeli A?”

The man laughed. “No shit. What city?”

“Oh. I . . . uh.” Feuilly felt his face grow hot. He'd spent his whole life looking up at the planet his home orbited, but he didn't know the name of any places on the surface.

“I’ll put you down for the capital, then?” The man said it like a question, but he was already entering the information on the form. His fingers flicked over a few more spaces, then: “One-way?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the cost for one-way passage from Gideon to Beta Caeli A, port of landing, St. Denis--that’s the name of the capital, by the way--is 20 mil. And here’s the part where I am contractually obligated to inform you that, if you select credit as your method of payment, the current interest rate is 22.09%; this is a fixed rate for a period of 1 year, at which point it is tied to the system-wide market credit rate, which a variable rate adjusted on a weekly basis. Should you elect to enter into a credit relationship with the Beta Caeli System Transport and Excavation Corporation, you will be pledging to repay the entire cost of your passage, plus any interest accrued on this amount in the meantime. Beta Caeli System Transport and Excavation Corporation will provide you with employment on your arrival on Beta Caeli A, as well as with housing and board, these costs to be charged against your account at the market credit rate. This credit relationship is defined as a category SCH-80092 under the regulations of the Intersystem Economic Activity Coalition, and is subject to all the laws and regulations of said coalition, any questions?”

Feuilly was taken by surprise at the question--the man had been rattling off the speech automatically, his eyes fixed on the screen where his fingers were flying over the form, and it didn’t seem like he was actually speaking to Feuilly. His mouth opened soundlessly as his brain scrambled to decode the information that had just been thrown at it. The TEC employee took his silence as a no and tapped the tablet; a moment later a sheet of thin gray plastic was spit out of one end of it.

“Here’s the papers,” the man said. “Lots of legalese, it basically says: You’re gonna pay the company back for cost of transport, no excuses, if you try to weasel out of it we will take actions, and none of us want that.” He grinned at Feuilly and slid the document across the flimsy desk. “I just need your mark at the bottom, here--right thumb, please, not left.”

Feuilly hesitated, his thumb hovering over the box the TEC employee had indicated, as the man shifted in his chair and started flicking through screens on the tablet. The characters on the dull gray document--actual text, not the pictographs that were used in the beat-up repair manuals he’d read cover-to-cover as he struggled, year after year, to keep the drill cooling systems online--swam before his eyes, lines and lines of tiny black letters that, Feuilly was sure, said really important things that he really should understand. He didn't trust TEC (nobody did, of course, for all they talked about them like salvation sometimes, since they _were_ the only way off) and he knew there was probably something nasty hidden in all that text. He opened his mouth to ask the man to explain what he was signing--but then he realized, what difference did it make? He didn’t have any other options.

He pressed his thumb into the square, and the plastic shivered and then stiffened under his skin to match his print. Wordlessly, he handed the document back to the TEC employee, who glanced at the mark, then fed the gray sheet into a document scanner. He looked up at Feuilly and smiled.

“Welcome to the company, boy.”

  
  


On paper, the planet of Beta Caeli A was not different from its moon in any significant way. Both colonies had been planted by the Terran Colonial Authority generations ago, seeded with colonists and housing pods and left basically to fend for themselves for hundreds of years, with occasional visits by ships that brought food and pills and took away the minerals the colonists had pried from the ground. Both the planet and the moon were categorized in as "Habitable--Class SR" in the Colonial Authority's Registry of Debarkable Objects, which meant that they were chunks of rock big enough to land on, that their atmospheres and surfaces didn't contain any substances that would instantly kill you or dissolve a space vessel, and that they had only "standard resources" (largely iron and salt).

This last piece of information was the most important one, since it determined the Colonial Authority's approach to the colonies: Keep them from dying, if it's convenient, but otherwise let them figure it out themselves. Both colonies were, technically, advance scouting parties sent to determine whether the debarkable object they'd been sent to contained valuable resources--rare metals like copper and silver that conducted electricity and could be used in computer circuits--that would merit the Colonial Authority upgrading its status to "Class VR" and taking an actual interest in its development--but after this many years, everyone knew that wasn't going to happen. If there was silver or copper in either site, the miners would have found it long ago. But the colonies remained on the books as Appraisal Operations, simply because it was easier and cheaper to leave the colonists on the surface of the useless planet and moon, and drop by to collect their standard resources periodically, than it would have been to move them off and find them a different planet to appraise. With a large-scale mining corporation like TEC involved, the Colonial Authority had even less work to do; they kept a small office in the capital of Beta Caeli A, and their shuttles stopped on Gideon once every few months.

But despite the technical similarities, Beta Caeli A could not have been more different from the cramped little moon base where Feuilly had spent his first nineteen years.

For the first few weeks of his life on Beta Caeli A, Feuilly was blown away at just . . . just how _much_ there was. Of everything. The city of St. Denis was _huge_ , rows on rows of metal-and-plastic housing, stretching so far in every direction you probably couldn’t see the edge of it even from the top of any of the _three_ communications towers. There were a few common building types that Feuilly began to recognize, slight design variations on long rectangles with rounded corners, their design and the dents some of them bore indicating they were prefab structures, factory-built on one of the inner planets and dropped from orbit for the colonists’ use. Some of them had been disassembled and cobbled together to make bigger buildings in new designs; others had smashed on impact despite the chutes and padding balloons, or had been worn down by time or violence and stood open to the sky like carcasses or draped over with plastic sheeting. There were a few buildings that stood out, because they were newer and clearly designed by a different hand in a different era; the huge TEC complex, which towered a full four stories above any other building in the city, was one of these.

And the people matched the buildings--thousands and thousands of people, taller than any on Gideon and with skin in all shades of brown and tan and black. They filled the hundreds of prefab houses and even overflowed them; Feuilly saw people sleeping outside in the open air, sheltering under sheets of discarded plastic or wedged under the rounded corners of buildings.

They had more _stuff_ on Beta Caeli A than Feuilly could have imagined, too. Even TEC, a single company (granted, a huge company with thousands of bonded workers to provide for--but still, _one_ company) in that big city, had whole rooms filled with boxes and boxes of protein cakes, vitamins, spare machinery parts, clothes, and things Feuilly didn’t even recognize. He almost broke his neck trying to look into all the rooms they passed when he was first marched through the TEC complex.

Even the _air_ was more than he was used to. It was thick enough he sometimes he imagined he could see the molecules dancing around in front of his eyes, and it was warm and full of gusty winds that whipped Feuilly’s clothes around whenever he stepped outside. And it was so saturated with oxygen that Feuilly’s moon lungs were overwhelmed by it. The first time he started hyperventilating (terrified, heart pounding in his ears, with no idea what was happening to him), someone gave him a plastic bag and he sat there breathing into it until he’d brought the air inside closer to the thin moon atmosphere he was used to and the black haze receded from the edges of his vision; he carried the bag around in his pockets for weeks.

To a boy who’d spent his whole life in the same five square kilometers, owning two sets of clothing and breaking protein cakes into halves, and then quarters, as he waited for the next trader arrived, it was an overwhelming abundance. It would be some time before Feuilly could see past the sheer numbers to the real scarcity underneath--helped along by a group of people who called themselves the Friends of Beta Caeli A

It was pure luck that he met them at all. Originally, Feuilly--like everyone TEC brought to the planet--was placed in Minerals Processing, and he spent the first few weeks shoveling rock chips into metal carts to be wheeled away and weighed and refined and whatever else happened to them on their way to becoming pure iron that could be shipped off the planet to whatever inner-ring planet TEC had its headquarters on. It was hard work, but no worse what he'd done on Gideon, and though the mine was hotter and the shift longer than what he'd worked on Gideon, the richer atmosphere helped. The worst thing about it was the boredom: On Gideon, there had been so few people that everyone ended up doing a little of everything. Feuilly had spent most of his time operating or monitoring the drill, but had done his share of carrying and sorting ore, in addition to helping repair the colony's public air filtration systems whenever they went down. Here on Beta Caeli A, he shoveled rocks. All day. For ten hours, plus a six-hour extra shift every other day.

Then, on his third week, one of the drills that spit out the rock chips for the workers to gather up shuddered and halted. Feuilly just happened to be working nearby, and he just happened to recognize the nasty whining sound it was making, because one of the fans in the ventilation system back on Gideon had made that exact same sound; when the green-jumpsuited people who came to look at the machine seemed to be getting frustrated, he mentioned it, and the machine was back up and running within an hour. A supervisor just happened to be standing nearby, and he called Feuilly over, asked him a few questions, and made a few notes in a file on his tablet.

The next day, Feuilly was transferred to Mechanical.

It was so much better than mining. Every day was interesting--looking at a fan or an exhaust vent, trying to puzzle out how it was supposed to work and why it _wasn’t_ doing that--it was a challenge, and working with all the unfamiliar machinery and equipment meant he was learning so much. And with his mind occupied, he spent less time worrying about the 20-million-credit debt hanging over him. The one real drawback was that workers in Mechanical didn’t have the option of the extra 6-hour shift. Still, the pay in Mechanical was a little better than Minerals Processing, so maybe it’d be all right.

More importantly, it was in Mechanical that he met Bossuet. Mechanical workers went out in teams of two or three to handle jobs, and the teams generally stayed the same, Feuilly gathered. Or at least, he assumed that was why everyone seemed slightly put off every time he was shuffled over to their department--here was a new person to make space for, and teams would need to be broken up and shuffled around, and established patterns broken. (On the fourth day, he overheard a scrap of incautious muttering in a hallway--“keep sending us these fucking bonded idiots . . . just because they can turn a screw, they think they know something . . . should leave them all in mining”--and he wondered if there wasn’t more to the complaining after all.) He didn’t have time to really reflect on the pattern, though, because on his seventh day in the division, he got a fifth transfer and was marched down yet another hallway to yet another workroom with beat-up desks and cluttered tool stations, and sent to the back left bench to stow his things next to a guy named Bossuet. And that was when the transfers ended.

Bossuet grinned up at Feuilly as he dropped his handbook and gloves down on the bench. “Do you sing?”

“What? Um, not really?”

Bossuet shrugged. “I used to work with a fellow who loved to sing. He did the old style--what do you call it, tenor. You know, the funny words and the big sounds, like _do-mi-sol-do-ti-sol-fa-re-do . . .”_ He gestured expressively with the hand that wasn’t holding a half-assembled fan motor. “You ever heard that kind of singing?”

Feuilly shook his head.

“Ahh, it’s great. Someday.” Bossuet nodded, backing up his own prediction. “Someday, a new guy is going to come walking in here, and we’ll ask him if he sings, and he’s say, ‘Why yes, actually, I sing tenor,’ and then you’ll hear. Every new person is a new chance.”

Bossuet was tall and lanky, with a shaved head and skin that was a patchwork of light and dark spots. He was almost always talking or laughing, and when he wasn’t doing either, he was smiling. He was quick, too: In the first few days that they worked together, he caught countless tools and bolts that Feuilly’s clumsy fingers (broken out in blisters in reaction to some chemical that had been used in his housing unit) dropped--and he was one of the few mechanics Feuilly had met who still had all ten fingers.

And he didn’t bat an eye when Feuilly admitted he couldn’t read. Feuilly tried to hide it for the first few days, quickly volunteering for whatever part of a new job didn’t involve looking things up in the manual, using what he already knew about machinery from years of working on it on Gideon to make educated guesses. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of not being able to read, really--after all, it wasn’t his fault--but the it was what had caused transfers two and three. And every day he spent in Mechanical made him even more desperate to not get sent back to Minerals Processing.

But he couldn’t keep it from his partner forever, and eventually the day came when Bossuet had both hands buried inside a motor, holding vital pieces in place, and he asked Feuilly to look in the manual to find which type of capacitor the model was supposed to take (“because if we just spent two hours taking this thing apart and the problem is that those guys put the wrong thing in here, I swear . . .”). Feuilly stood there for a few seconds, flipping through the book, his heart beating faster as he stared at the meaningless symbols, then gave up and admitted he didn’t know how to find the right page, much less read what it said.

“Oh, okay,” Bossuet said. “Well here, bring it over here and hold it up so I can see. Okay, go to page sixty-two--ah, do you know how to find . . .”

“Yeah,” Feuilly said, flipping quickly to the right page. “I can read numbers--and I know the alphabet. I can read part numbers and such. It’s just--all our manuals on Gideon were written in pictographs, or almost all of them, anyway. Nobody there knew how to read letter text, so there was no way to learn.”

“Ah, that makes sense. Okay, can you turn the--yeah, so this model takes a 165-volt capacitor and they tried to use a 125, so obviously that’s the problem, and everything we’ve spent the last two hours working on was pointless." He laughed, unable to hold even a fake scowl for very long. "On the other hand, we _did_ get a lot of basic maintenance in, so we won’t have to service this machine again for a few months, as long as . . .” And that was it.

It was through Bossuet, in turn, that Feuilly met Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac, another mechanic, was as opposite from Bossuet in appearance as you could be: He was small for someone born and raised on the planet (though still an inch or two taller than Feuilly), and where Bossuet was all taut muscle on long, lanky limbs, Courfeyrac had the round face and soft figure of someone who’d never had to break protein cakes in thirds to make them last. The one thing they had in common was laughter; like Bossuet, Courfeyrac was always laughing, and he had the kind of laugh that made everyone around him smile along with him.

Courfeyrac worked in the lighting division, repairing the ancient Terran LEDs with tiny tools or replacing them with less efficient Beta-Caeli-built emitters when the old parts finally broke down past repairing, but you wouldn’t have known it, for all the time he spent down in the HVAC division hallway--and in the Excavation Machinery building, and in the Medical Tech lab . . . he seemed to know someone everywhere, and always had the time to stop by their bench to ask how things were going.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, between them, introduced Feuilly to the Friends of BCA.

“BCA is Beta Caeli A, of course,” Courfeyrac explained, around a mouthful of something called "curry" (It was the same protein everyone ate, of course, but in a kind of sauce that smelled deceptively amazing and just tasted like fire; when he’d made Feuilly try it, Courfeyrac had laughed at his reaction--then apologized shamefacedly as Feuilly continued gulping water for ten minutes afterward). He’d dropped by the HVAC hall to eat his midday meal with Bossuet and Feuilly, and the two had started talking about this volunteer group they went out with twice a week. “And it's 'Friends,' because the idea is that we do for anyone on the planet what we’d do for our own friends.”

“It’s a stupid name,” Bossuet declared, with mock sullenness. “ _I_ said we should have called it ‘Beta Caeli Aid,’ but nobody saw what genius that was.”

“What is it, though?” Feuilly asked. Courfeyrac’s description had him imagining thousands of people sitting down to eat lunch together, or maybe trading recipes for ridiculously spicy food--whatever it was friends on Beta Caeli A did in their free time.

“We’re a group of tradespeople, mostly,” Courfeyrac said. “Boss and I are mechanics, obviously, and we have a few folks from the clinics, and one who works in food production. We go to the poor areas of the city, where people don’t have the necessities of life, and we help them out however we can. Fixing broken machinery, free medical care. Most of the independent miners and un-bonded TEC workers don’t have those skills and can’t afford to pay someone else to do it for them, so they go without. And that’s not fair. What kind of world is it if nobody will look at a sick child?”

“We try to bring them some extra food and other supplies, too,” Bossuet added. “That comes out of our own pockets, so we can’t do much, but in these parts of the city--I don’t know how much you’ve explored, so far, but these people really don’t have much.”

“Would you like to come with us sometime?” Courfeyrac offered. “I think you’d really like it--and you’d be a huge help; what we work on most on these trips is ventilation and climate control systems. The extra supplies part is completely optional, by the way--not everybody contributes in that way, and it’s completely fine. Just giving those few hours of time is plenty.”

Feuilly considered it. He liked Bossuet and Courfeyrac just fine--but they were obviously from a different world from his, one where you put spicy sauces on your food to make it more interesting, as if eating was a pastime and not a necessary step to keep your body moving. Their offhand comments about spending their own money to buy things for the people in these poor neighborhoods highlighted the gulf: Feuilly, millions in debt, wouldn't have a single credit to his name for years. On the other hand, almost everyone else in the neighborhood where Feuilly lived worked in Minerals Processing and took the extension shifts after their regular ten hours. He needed to find some way to fill up those empty evenings. And if there were people in the city who lacked the basic necessities of life, and he had the ability to provide some of them (although he wasn’t quite sure how climate control fit into it) . . . how could he refuse?

  
  


“We go usually to neighborhoods on the northeast side of the city,” Bossuet explained the next evening, as they started off, heading down the street in the opposite direction from the one Feuilly usually took at the end of the day. There were four people in the group, in addition to Bossuet and Courfeyrac. Three of them worked at a clinic on the north side of the city; Absolon and Floreal were doctors, and Jehan was a clerk. Feuilly was still waiting to find out what exactly the final group member, Enjolras, was doing there, since he worked in information systems, fixing computers--a skill that didn't seem terribly relevant to the goal of giving people the necessities of living.

“I mean, we've only been doing this for a few months," Bossuet continued, "so we haven't had time to cover much area, but the northeast is where we're concentrating for now. The northwest districts are generally more well-off, and whole south district is, of course, where TEC houses their bonded workers.”

“Slaves, Bossuet,” Enjolras interrupted from in front of them, breaking off his own conversation to look back over his shoulder. “Call it what it is.”

Bossuet’s eyes flicked over to Courfeyrac’s for a moment. “Enjolras is . . . not really in favor of the bonded labor system,” he explained. “None of us are, to be honest--not that we have anything against people who--who need to use that option, but we think the corporation exploits that need unfairly.”

“It’s slavery.” Enjolras had slowed his pace to fall back to walk with Bossuet and Feuilly, overlooking Bossuet's efforts to pass over the subject. His voice rose as he continued and he looked right at Feuilly, as if challenging him to contradict him. “It’s a disgusting, oppressive system that takes advantage of people who are living in poverty and uses their desperation to draw them into a trap. It claims to be providing opportunities when what it’s really doing is taking away all people’s options--and then using their desire to get free to goad them into working harder, when in reality it’s impossible to ever get out of that system, even a few minutes of looking at the pay scales and the interest rates and the price of TEC-provided room and board will make it clear that the longer you’re with TEC, the _more_ in debt you’ll be. And it doesn’t matter that it was their choice to get into it-- _how_ is it a meaningful choice when sometimes the people had no other option, or when they don’t even understand the papers they’re signing; most people in this position can’t read, after all, and what are the chances anyone actually sits down with them and explains--”

“The point,” Courfeyrac said, cutting Enjolras off. “The _point_ is that TEC provides the necessities for the people in that system--food, housing, healthcare--and so we’ve concentrated on the independent workers who may not be able to get even those necessities with what they bring in on their own. Maybe that approach is something we should reconsider as the group expands, actually--but everything we’ve heard is that the TEC workers’ district isn’t that bad, and at least basic needs are met.”

Feuilly nodded, thinking of the protein cakes he’d put aside over the first few weeks, when two a day was more than he could handle, the stash of vitamins that was accumulating in his lockbox as they kept showing up on his dinner tray every few days. “It’s true; the people in the workers’ complex have more than enough.”

“How do you know?” Absolon asked. He didn’t sound skeptical, just curious.

Feuilly felt Courfeyrac stiffen, and out of the corner of his eye saw him opening his mouth to change the subject, to give Feuilly an out. For a second, Feuilly considered taking it--but then he reflected that they’d find out sometime, surely, and there would just be more awkwardness if he put the moment off.

“I live there,” he said. “I signed on with TEC two months ago.”

To their credit, Enjolras and his friend did their best to hide their surprise--but Feuilly still caught a flash of pity run across their faces. Enjolras’s ears flushed a bright red and for a moment his mouth hung open, wordless. Then his eyes lit up and he started talking excitedly, the words spilling out twice as fast as in his first rant.

"We'll have to talk about it sometime; I'd love to hear an insider's perspective on the system--and especially how it was presented to you when you signed on. Because it's an unjust system either way, the way it's structured so that once a person is in, it's nearly impossible to get out--but what we've heard is that, for many people, it isn't even explained to them, and that some people are told outright lies about the terms."

They reached the first neighborhood on their itinerary, and a few people started peeling off to knock on doors or approach people in the street; Enjolras paused at the entrance to one alley, still talking a mile a minute. "And of course this is all in the future, but I would really like to do something to challenge the system--but since the contracts are all intialized off-world, it's impossible to observe the process, or get any facts to work with. So we're really very much in the dark about it, and it'd be great to talk with someone so closely familiar with the system and hear your thoughts about what needs to change, and how."

Feuilly wasn't sure he understood half of what Enjolras was talking about, but there was something about the way of talking that he really liked. Enjolras seemed to care deeply about what he was saying, and to really believe that he could--and would--change things. Nobody on Gideon had talked like that.

So he said, "Yes, I . . . I'd like that." And Enjolras's smile was all delight, without a trace of pity.

  
  


Later on, as they left the neighborhood, the sky was getting darker. Feuilly found himself walking in the middle of the group, alongside Enjolras and Courfeyrac; just behind them, Absolon and Jehan were talking about languages. The other two were a little farther ahead, laughing loudly, as if to hold back the oncoming night.

When there was a lull in Enjolras and Courfeyrac’s conversation, Feuilly broke in with a question he’d been wondering about all evening. “I thought we were going to the poorest parts of the city?”

Enjolras’s eyebrows tightened slightly. “Well, this sector isn’t the _very_ poorest, but things are pretty bad here. Why?”

“Oh.” Feuilly blinked. “Okay.”

“Why?” Enjolras asked again.

“It just . . . it didn’t seem that bad. I was surprised.” When nobody said anything, he went on, if for no other reason than to fill up the silence. “I mean, it was dirty--not that I blame them, there’s _so much_ dust here; I don’t know how anyone keeps it out of the houses--but it seemed like the people had . . . well, they have plenty.” He paused, looking around. Everyone was still silent. “Don’t they?”

When Enjolras spoke, his voice was strangely careful, as if he was holding back a lot more that he wanted to say. “The people here have the necessities of day-to-day survival,” he said. “But not much else--and occasionally, not even that. I’m not sure how that could be described as ‘plenty.’”

“But we fixed their air conditioners?” Feuilly said, confused. “We gave them bottles and bottles of vitamins.”

“These people live on protein cakes,” Courfeyrac explained. “The vitamin pills have essential . . . well, vitamins, I don’t know how to explain _what_ they are. But they’re things you need to get in order to stay healthy--to _survive_ , I’m pretty sure--and if all you’re eating is protein cake, you have to get the vitamins from the pills.”

“Well, sure, I know that--but we gave them about a year’s supply. That one mother took four bottles, at one a week, that’d last her--”

“One a week? They’re one a _day_ , Feuilly, it says it right on the--oh.” Courfeyrac stopped suddenly, a strange look on his face. “You’re supposed to take one a day,” he said quietly.

“Oh,” Feuilly echoed. Nobody he knew had ever bothered to find out what the text on the vitamin bottle labels said. After all, when you could only afford one or two bottles every time a trading ship docked, there wasn’t much point. “We never . . . on Gideon, one a week was _good_.”

Feuilly didn’t realize anyone else had been listening to their conversation until Absolon stepped a little closer and asked quietly, “So, when you said earlier that things are fine in the TEC district . . . can you describe what ‘fine’ looks like, for you?”

“I don’t know,” Feuilly said, feeling his cheeks grow hot under the steady gaze of four near-strangers. “Two protein cakes a day and a place to sleep out of the rain and wind--pods about like the ones we saw tonight, but shared between six people. And they give you clothes, and vitamins, twice a week.” Which he had already learned was, apparently, not actually enough. And judging from the looks on the others’ faces, the rest of what he was saying measured up just as badly.

“Is there climate control?” Enjolras wanted to know.

“You mean, like . . . air conditioning?”

“And heat.”

Feuilly shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not . . . _is_ that a necessity?”

Courfeyrac smiled sadly. “You haven’t seen the summers here yet. Or the winters, for that matter. In a few weeks, 36 degrees will be a good day.”

“Oh,” Feuilly managed. “How do . . . how do you _survive_ that?” The warmest he could _ever_ remember it getting on Gideon was 22 degrees, and that had been because of a fire.

“A lot of people don’t,” Absolon said, serious. “Old people, especially. And children. Keeping the machinery going will be even more important--literally life-saving--when it gets to be summer.”

“And now it sounds like we might need to think about expanding into the south of the city,” Enjolras said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We never really thought about it. This was all so new to us, and the problems were so big; everyone said ‘oh, TEC provides their slaves with everything they need,’ so we didn’t question it.” He seemed almost to be pleading. “It was easier not to, you know, when everywhere else was so bad and it was already so hard to think about making a difference there.”

“And it made sense,” Absolon added. “With the whole . . . with the bonded labor system. If you want the people who work for you to go ever deeper into debt, then the more things you give them, the more in debt to you they are. And--as abhorrent as the system is--it would be logical for them to take care of their workers.” He grimaced. “Even if you don’t believe in human goodness, one likes to hope you can at least believe in _logic_.”

Jehan frowned thoughtfully. “I think their prices even for those basic necessities are so high that they don’t need the extras to keep the workers indebted forever. So what would be the point in giving them anything beyond what they need to keep putting one foot in front of the other?”

“Human decency?” Courfeyrac all but wailed. “Justice? The multiple economic and social benefits of _taking care of your workers_?”

“I’m just saying,” the tall one said, and Courfeyrac sighed.

“I know, I know. The priorities of a corporation are inherently different from those of people. But . . ." Courfeyrac made a strangled, inarticulate noise and let his hands fall to his sides.

“It’ll be harder to do anything in the TEC district,” Enjolras said. “Since they make money off anything their bonded workers get from them, they probably don’t want anyone bringing in free stuff. Feuilly, maybe you can help us figure out what the rules are. And--” he grinned, “--and how we can get around them.”

“And what the greatest needs are,” Absolon added. He seemed to be already composing checklists and action plans in his head. “We can’t fix all the city’s problems at once; we need to prioritize so we do the most good with the resources we have.”

“Hey!” Feuilly glanced up and realized they’d stopped walking some time back; the other two were far ahead, and Floreal was calling back to them. “What’s taking so long back there?”

Courfeyrac shook himself and pulled out a smile. “Nothing,” he called back. “Just trying to fix all the city’s problems at once.”

As they caught up with the others, Absolon touched Feuilly's arm and said quietly, "I'm sorry if that conversation put you in an awkward position. I didn't mean to put you on the spot or make you feel like a specimen for study or anything. TEC doesn't make a lot of details about the way it operates public, and the people here generally take the attitude of 'if I don't talk about it, it doesn't exist'--and then they don't talk about uncomfortable things--and the result is we don't know much about it." He smiled apologetically. "So in my excitement at actually finding a soure for real information, I might have overstepped. I don't want you to feel like--"

Feuilly cut him off. "It's fine." He returned Absolon's smile, then quickened his steps to catch up with the others.

It was only half a lie. The whole thing had certainly made him feel even more like a stupid foreigner than ever, and he could practically _feel_ the pity radiating off of Enjolras and Absolon and Jehan. A minute ago, he'd been promising himself that he would never show his face among the Friends of BCA again.

But with the attention off him and the chance to think it over, he was realizing that, uncomfortable as the experience was, he was learning a lot from it--about TEC, about how things worked on BCA. He was beginning to see that even though there was a lot of everything on Beta Caeli A, "a lot" might still not be enough. St. Denis might have a lot of buildings, but they most of them were old enough that they were starting to fall apart, as rubber seals crumbled and plastic screws snapped. Lots of people just meant more miners scrambling for the same lumps of low-grade iron ore and dirty salt, more people in line at the clinic for the limited supply of antibiotics, more people prodicing garbage to blow through the streets in the ceaseless wind. And at the same time, Feuilly liked the way Enjolras and Absolon talked about the problems on this planet--like they were something to change, and not just the facts that made up the background of life.

It might be enough to come back for.

  
  


Two years later, Feuilly was still there.

On the second and fourth day of every week, he ate a quick dinner with Courfeyrac and Bossuet at the private cafeteria a block up the street from the Mechanical offices (still deeply in debt, Feuilly didn't have any money to spend at a private business like that, but Courfeyrac kept badgering him to let him buy him a meal, and after six months, Feuilly had given in). Then they would head across the city, meeting the others on their way, and spend the next few hours fixing fans and distributing vitamins and teaching skinny little children the alphabet.

Not everything was the same as it had been. Absolon had moved on from St. Denis to start a clinic of his own somewhere out in the less developed part of the planet, and they'd lost touch with him. And Floreal had been hired as the medic for a large merchant ship that ran a four-year route between Beta Caeli and two neighboring star systems. The two doctors had been replaced by Joly, a young medic who'd just started at Jehan's clinic a few months back, and who always had his pockets stuffed full of such a strange assortment of little odds and ends--pins and tape and paint and packets of salt--that he could be counted on to always have whatever little thing you needed.

Others had joined the group in the two years since Feuilly had come to St. Denis, and many of them had moved on as well. Sakura had moved back to the city where she'd grown up to care for her parents. Donatien had been killed in a mining accident. Camila had simply stopped showing up, after five months in the group, and nobody knew where she'd gone. But some of the new members were still there. In addition to Joly, there were Musichetta and Bahorel (nominally an ordering manager at a cafeteria and an independent miner, but more importantly the owners of a little farm on the edge of the city where they were trying to develop BCA-native food sources), Courfeyrac's friend Marius, who he'd met by literally running into him in a busy street, and Ep, a wary-faced young woman who'd come trailing in reluctantly behind Marius. And so far, all four of these people had stayed.

At the moment, in fact, there were too many group members for everyone to go out in a single group, and so they split up, with Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Enjolras, and Feuilly heading into the bonded workers' district and the others going west and south, into the poorest sections of the city where independent workers lived. To keep communication going between the groups, they met up the day before every Cycle Day--the day off that all employees of TEC received every 40 days--to exchange stories and lay out strategies for their next few weeks of work. Their full number wouldn't fit in any of their cramped living quarters (except for Bahorel and Musichetta's farm, which was more than an hour's walk from the city center), so they'd taken to meeting in the cafeteria where Feuilly and the other mechanics usually ate. Courfeyrac would order coffee and protein chips for everyone, and Bahorel would pass around fresh fruit from the farm that he'd smuggled into the restaurant, and it became almost a party--especially with the promise of a day off the next day.

On an evening before Cycle Day in late spring, about two and a half years after Feuilly had signed on with TEC, he arrived at the cafeteria to find Enjolras and Jehan and Joly already there, saving tables in the quickly-filling room. Enjolras was, as usual, ranting about the latest problem to catch his attention.

"It's horrible what they get away with," he was telling Jehan as the others came up. "There must be something we can do--maybe if we

"Is this the new Cause of the Week?" Bossuet asked, sliding into a seat next to Joly and giving him a quick peck on the cheek.

Enjolras frowned. "Don't be flippant," he muttered. "People's lungs are rotting out int thier chests because of all the poisons the refinery is piping into the atmosphere. It's appalling."

"It is," Feuilly agreed. "And so is the unequal distribution of medication between public clinincs in different areas of the city. And the decay of the old warehouses in the Needle District. And the way the police are ignoring reports of muggings and assaults. But Bossuet has a point--we can't tackle all of it at once. If we keep jumping around from issue to issue, it'll just make things more unstable. And it loses us credibility too."

"I know," Enjolras sighed. "There's just so much that's wrong; I can't just sit back and let it happen."

"But you're not just sitting back, you're actively working on other problems," Jehan pointed out. "You can't change everything all at once; it's just not possible."

"I know," Enjolras said again. "It's so frustrating, though. I wish we could do more--do something that would change BCA in a big way."

"One day at a time," Courfeyrac told him. "We'll get there. In the meantime, can I get you a coffee?"

The cafeteria was crowded with pre-Cycle Day revelers, and it took a long time to order food. By the time Courfeyrac and Feuilly made it back to the group's tables, bearing trays loaded with coffee and protein chips and desserts, almost everyone had arrived. Musichetta was animatedly reinacting an argument she'd had with a supplier earlier that day, Ep ducking to avoid her waving arms; Bahorel was arguing with Jehan over what to name a newly discovered subspecies of fruit tree; Joly and Bossuet seemed to be making up a song that rhymed "virutal reality" with "genetic abnormality." Enjolras was just sitting back quietly, smiling as he listened to the conversations. Feuilly couldn't keep a sappy grin off his own face. These were such good people, and he was so lucky to get to spend a few years with them, here in the middle of this big, harsh city.

Marius reached the tables at about the same time Courfeyrac and Feuilly did, and so his arm-flapping entrance was somewhat lost in the collective celebration of the arrival of the food. But instead of fluttering distractedly into a seat, as he usually did, Marius planted his hands on the table and shouted "Listen to me!"

Everyone turned to stare at Marius, but he was too excited even to get flustered over it. "I was just finishing up at the office," he panted, wiping the sweat from his face; he must have run all the way from the Colonial Authority offices. "--and I saw a memo, it wasn't supposed to go to me--someone had printed it and left it there. And it said the--the presence of copper--in one of the outlying settlements--was confirmed."

"Copper?" Bahorel gasped. Marius breathlessly flapped his hands at him, glancing meaningfully at the room packed with people, and Bahorel lowered his voice. "Are you sure?"

"It was addressed to--the director." Marius nodded furiously. "It's for real. Beta Caeli A is going to be a Class-VR planet!"

And in that moment, Feuilly realized that everything was going to change.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: Child abuse (the Thenardiers are in this chapter)

"So the question is, what are we going to do about this?" Enjolras asked.

His voice was quiet, but everyone who had been talking loudly and passionately around their tables (after all, their world had just been turned upside down, and their worthless little planet was suddenly worth trillions) immediately fell into silence when Enjolras spoke, as if each of them had had one ear listening for him the whole time.

"What do you mean, what are we going to do?" Bossuet said. "It's a huge deal, of course--I understand that--but isn't it kind of out of our hands? The message to the Colonial Authority will go out in, what, seventy-two hours?" He glanced at Marius, who nodded. "And then they'll bring in survey teams and bigger equipment and whatever, and yes, there are going to be a lot of changes, but . . . what does it have to do with us? We don't have any say in what happens."

Feuilly glanced around at the tables around them as Bossuet spoke, but nobody seemed to be looking in their direction. The cafeteria, a larger, open-air structure that had been assembled from parts of several smaller pods, was a crowded place, but the noise and the constant movement all around them afforded a kind of privacy; with so many people talking and yelling and laughing, what was one more energetic conversation?

"We _should_ have a say in it, though--it's our planet." Enjolras leaned forward, and Courfeyrac nudged a tray out of the way of his trailing sleeve. "If this is going to change everything, they should bring it before the public and let everyone who lives here have a chance to influence what happens. It shouldn't be something that just happens behind closed doors at the colony station."

"You're right," Bahorel agreed. "And that's something we can change. _We_ know what's going on, and we can get the word out to everyone. That doesn't necessarily force the Colonial Authority to _listen_ to us, but at least what's going on won't be a secret. They can't control the information."

"All right, so we can tell people what's going on," Musichetta said. "But Enjolras, it sounded like you meant doing something more."

Enjolras nodded. "If there's anything we've learned from our Friends of BCA work, it's that all the little problems that we started out addressing--a sick child, and no money to pay the clinic--can be traced back to bigger problems, to the way the economy of this planet is set up, and to the colonial system itself. So if big changes are going to happen in those structures, it's going to lead to thousands of little changes for individual people. And I'm not sure they're going to be good ones."

"Why wouldn't they be?" Musichetta asked. "Being upgraded to a Class-VR planet means more contact with the rest of the system--the rest of the universe. We know that the inner planets have medical capabilities way beyond anything we've got, and other technology to match, but we don't get it out here because we're not important enough. If we-- _when_ we become a Class VR, we'll have access to the advanced science and tech we've been starving for for so long."

"Not to mention the money that'll be coming in," Marius added. "Have you _seen_ what copper is trading at right now?"

"But how much of that prosperity is actually going to reach the average person?" Enjolras asked. "Look at how things are now: This planet mines millions of tons of raw iron every year, but between what goes to the Colonial Authority and what TEC takes, only about 20 percent of that revenue actually stays on BCA. Going up to Class VR just means that the Colonial Authority will be more involved in BCA--I don't think that'll be a good thing. They don't care about us; their sole purpose is to siphon resources back to New Terra."

"They're basically a giant corporation," Jehan agreed. "--another TEC, but a thousand times as big. And we all know how TEC treats the workers it doesn't care about."

"Exactly!" Bahorel leaned forward. "We're better off without them. We're doing okay on our own--or we would be, if we weren't so fixated on ripping apart our planet for the iron to build other people's cities. If we actually focused on _developing_ BCA, the planet could be self-sufficient. You all know what we've managed to do at the farm."

"We've been trying some really interesting things with the fruit trees this year," Joly added, looking up from the mug of hot tea he was clutching, despite the warm weather. "We're actually getting flavors that ressemble food from them. Some of those flavors were a spectacular failure, of course, but others are yielding some really strong results."

"If we put more time and work into this kind of thing," Bahorel said, "we could probably be completely self-sufficient for food in ten, maybe twenty years, and we wouldn't need the minerals trade for survival."

"But how many other farming techniques are there out in the universe that we've never thought of?" Musichetta pointed out. "Setting aside genetic code manipulation tech that would let us create hardier varieties and get a longer growing season, there are trillions of other farmers out there on the other outer planets, all with new ideas of their own. Just increasing the flow of information into Beta Caeli A could transform things here."

Enjolras nodded. "All right, more access to technological and scientific developments from other planets would be a major advantage; I can see that. But would it be worth everything else that comes with it?" He sighed. "I wish there was a way to just get the information flow without all the rest of it."

"That'd be the ideal," Bahorel agreed.

"What if we just . . . left the copper in the ground?" Bossuet suggested. His tone was playful but Bahorel and Enjolras were nodding thoughtfully.

Feuilly cleared his throat. "You're never going to sell that plan in this city," he said flatly. "People need that copper and the better quality of life it'll bring--and we're not talking about people eating sugar every day or every family owning a shuttle. We're talking about vitamins. Shoes without holes for the winter. Housing with seals that keep out the refinery fumes so you don't wake up coughing blood. You can talk about information flow and technological advances and being self-sufficient in ten years, or twenty . . . it's not going to mean anything to people whose children are dying."

"I understand what you're saying completely," Enjolras said. "And if I were sure that mining the copper would actually result in a better quality of life for people here, I'd be completely in favor of it. But how do we know that all the extra income won't go straight to the Colonial Authority? Can we really be sure that becoming a Class-VR planet is really going to change anything?"

"I think it will," Feuilly said. "I know a lot of you still find it hard to believe, but things are a lot better here than they are on Gideon--and Gideon has less Colonial Authority involvement. But Beta Caeli A still has more mineral resources and more contact with the rest of the universe; ships dock here every week instead of every few months. It makes a huge difference. It means there's actually antibiotics here for when your child gets sick. It means you don't have to wonder every time you buy protein cakes or air filters, 'will this be enough or will I run out before the next ship comes?'"

"Maybe what's most important here," Courfeyrac said, "is to recognize what we can't change. This thing has happened, and keeping it secret is going to be impossible. Generations of people on this planet have spent their entire lives with the discovery of copper being that one bright dream that's kept them going--the one thing there still was to hope for. We're never going to convince them not to contact the Colonial Authority. What we need to do is figure out how to influence that process so that the shape it takes is as beneficial as possible for the people."

"Which is difficult, because we don't even know what that process usually looks like," Musichetta added. "And I think it's really important that we try to find out. It'd be dishonest to present people with dire stories about the future under the Colonial Authority when so much of it is based on speculation. None of us has ever been to a Class-VR planet, after all."

There was a long silence; several people around the tables were nodding slowly. Then Ep, sitting on the far edge of the group, spoke up. "Um--I have."

All eyes turned to her, and she flushed nad looked down at the table, but she kept talking. "We moved around a lot, when I was younger. Some of the places we stayed for a little while were Class-VR planets."

"Which ones?" Bahorel asked, at the same time that Marius exclaimed, "You never told me that!" and Enjolras asked "What were they like?"

"I don't remember a lot," Ep said, ignoring the other two questions. "It was a while ago. But . . . okay, when I was about fourteen we spent a while on Bellerophon. That's a Class VR, and it's kind of a hellhole. Everything's underground, because of the storms on the surface, so it's all tunnels and stairs, all with those orange lamps that make that whining sound that you can just barely hear."

"I've heard of Bellerophon," Bahorel said. "Wasn't there some trouble there, a while back?" Ep's eyes darted suspiciously over to him, narrowing, and he added quickly, "Maybe that happened after you left. I just remember hearing something about fighting there."

She nodded reluctantly. "Yeah, there's . . . the whole place used to belong to the Colonial Authority; they're the ones who did the excavation and brought in all the workers."

"Like TEC does?" Enjolras asked.

"Yes, only they weren't bonded--at least, I don't think they were. But it was like they belonged to the Colonial Authority anyway, because you couldn't just go off and mine on your own; it's illegal there." She shrugged. "Or it was. I guess people might be doing it now, because the Four Families moved in on the planet and they're into shit that's a lot worse than unauthorized mining. They've got like half the planet now, and the Colonial Authority can't do anything about it, so maybe people can get away with whatever they want, at least in those parts of the planet. Probably not worth it, though, since the Families' take would be so high."

"How are things for the Colonial Authority's workers?" Courfeyrac asked. "Is it like the bonded workers' district here, or are things generally better?"

Ep hesitated. "I--I think they're about like here," she said. "I don't . . . I mean, the whole planet is about the same--dark and dirty and ugly, no sunlight, no fresh air. It wasn't like there were clinics on every corner or anything. I think everybody in the system knew Bellerophon was basically a pretty shitty place to work, just like everywhere else."

"So being a Class VR didn't make much difference there," Jehan observed.

"But there was another one, another Class VR," Ep continued. "I was a lot younger then, maybe nine or ten--but I remember some things. It was in the Kepler-62 system, Kepler-62 F, I think. It was a really nice place. It was really cold there all the time, but the housing was all god, so it didn't really matter. It wasn't prefab stuff from when they first put down the colony, like we have here--I mean, some of it was, but most of it was built on-world. It had more built-in tech, more advanced stuff. And it was solider, like it was built to last."

"How was the colony there set up?" Musichetta asked. "Were people independent agents, or were things centrally distributed?"

"It was all run by the central board," Ep said, with more confidence than she'd had about conditions on Bellerophon. "You had to register with them if you wanted to mine or sell things or anything. You were still in business for yourself, and they didn't take a big cut, but they kind of watched over everything, made sure everyone was dealing fairly."

As Ep recounted more details about the planets, and the others kept asking questions, her shoulders relaxed a little, losing the defensive, hunched-up posture she usually had. Her voice grew louder and more confident as well, and she stopped glancing over at Marius on every other sentence, like she usually did.

And still, Feuilly was put on edge by her.

He'd never been able to figure out why, but from the very first day she'd showed up for a Friends of BCA project, trailing on Marius's heels, he'd disliked her. He _tried_ not to; he didn't want to be the kind of person who couldn't get along with some personalities. And besides, Ep represented a lot of things the relief group needed more of: She was a woman, in a group heavily weighted toward men, and (even if she never talked about it) her tiny frame and hollow cheeks suggested that she, like Feuilly, came from a background when a meal every night hadn't been a guarantee. She didn't really fit in with the others, and for that reason he _wanted_ to be extra welcoming to her. But for some reason that Feuilly couldn't put a finger on, he just didn't _like_ her.

Eventually, he'd decided it must be her immaturity--the obvious way she focused on Marius, always at his elbow, lauging too loud at anything he said--and the way she constantly seemed on edge that made him uncomfortable around her. And having analyzed it, he tried to get over the feeling and treat her with as much friendliness as possible. But he couldn't help but feel that there was something more to it.

Maybe he was right, because seeing her, for the first time, throw off her usual bearing of a little kid afraid of being hit, and actually speak up confidently--it didn't do anything about the deep . . . not dislike exactly, but _discomfort_ that Feuilly felt every time he was around Ep. He shook his head, scolding himself inwardly for his lack of generosity (earing a curious look from Courfeyrac), and tried to focus on the information she was sharing.

". . . and they _did_ have better medical care," she was saying. "They had big hospitals, with machines that could keep somebody alive for weeks, and they had mandatory vaccination for everybody when you went to school. But just like here, you had to be able to pay--the vaccines were free, but everything else cost money. We had to take Azelma--uh, my sister--to a clinic a couple of months before we left Kepler-62 F, because she got hurt, um, falling down, and all we could afford was . . ."

And then it clicked--why there was something about her he couldn't place, the reason for the mysterious feeling of resentment and discomfort she brought out in him. Why he didn't like her.

"Oh my god!" The words fell out of Feuilly's mouth without thought. "I _know_ you."

Everyone turned to him in confusion, but Feuilly was too surprised to feel any embarrassment.

"You lived on Gideon--when you were little--you and your family. You were called Eponine then."

The others still looked lost, but Ep laughed softly, with a little half-smile of understanding. "Heh, so you didn't recognize me." Her voice dropped to a murmur, almost lost under the others' surprised questions. "I knew you right away."

"So you two were kids together?" Courfeyrac asked, excitedly. "And now--after all these years, after everywhere Ep's traveled--you're here in the same city again? What are the odds!"

"One in . . . a whole lot." Joly laughed. "Something like the odds of leaving a piece of cake out on the table at the farm and finding it still there in an hour."

Bossuet beamed. "It's amazing. We say so many goodbyes, and you always think you'll never see that person again, with the universe as big as it is. But sometimes you get lucky, and people come back to you."

"I guess so," Feuilly said, half-automatically. Was he smiling? He needed to smile--he hoped it didn't look too obviously fake. He looked around for a way to get the attention off him and his reaction to what everyone seemed to be assuming was a long-lost childhood friend--and he found it in the impatient restraint in Enjolras's face. "But she was in the middle of saying something important--sorry for interrupting. We should get back to the discussion."

"Yes," Enjolras agreed. "You were talking about access to medical care, Ep?"

As Ep picked back up her derailed account of the conditions on the Class-VR planets she'd lived on, and everyone's eyes fell off him, Feuilly abandoned all attempts to listen to the conversation. Seeing Eponine again--or rather, _knowing_ who it was she was seeing--was bringing back a lot of memories, from years and years ago, things he hadn't thought about in a long time. It would take him a little while to work them out, to get his emotions back under control so he could successfully hide the disappointment and resentment Ep's reappearance had brought up in him.

Bossuet had been right: Sometimes, against all odds, people who've left you come back into your life again.

And sometimes they're not at all the people you wanted.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Lark had arrived with one of the traders who stopped by Gideon every few months. The Thenardiers were, in most ways, just like every other trader, bringing protein cakes and fan belts and plastic shoes, wrinkling their noses under their oxygen masks as they looked around the port. The only difference was that the Thenardiers stayed.

It wasn't by choice, of course. They stayed because some important part in their ship's engine had snapped and there was no replacement part on Gideon, nor anyone who could make the ship work without the part. They'd barely managed to limp their way to Gideon, drifting on inertia and emergency steering rockets after their engine finally coughed its way to a halt, and now they were stuck there until someone else stopped by who could fix the ship. (Why they'd headed for Gideon and not to one of the nearby planets, where they could have easily found the part and the worker to do the repairs was a mystery Feuilly's nine-year-old mind skipped right over, oblivious.)

The Thenardiers had two children, or maybe three; it depended how you counted. There were two chubby little girls who wandered about the port hand in hand, in their matching dresses and little pink oxygen masks, one carrying a doll and the other a toy spaceship, peering into run-down habitation pods with childish interest. And then there was the other little girl, the one who wore a ragged, oversized jumpsuit with the sleeves and legs rolled up, and who mostly stayed out of sight. She didn't have an oxygen mask.

The first two daughters were named Eponine and Azelma, romantic names out of some old story of love and freedom and sacrifice, names that rang strange in the thin moon-colony air, shouted from the open hatch of a run-down solar system jumper two generations out of date. In a naming pattern equally as strange, though in the opposite direction, Mrs. Thenardier (her husband didn't use names, except when he wanted something from someone and was trying to win their approval) called the other little girl by the name of a brand of cheap little interplanetary shuttle: Lark.

After the people of Gideon had bought what little merchandise they were prepared to take from the traders, Mr. Thenardier spent a full week sitting out in the port in front of his ship, loudly announcing the quality and desirability of his wares. When the people's ability to pay didn't change, he swore a lot and put Lark to carrying all the things back inside. Then the family settled in and waited for another ship to come.

By the third week of the waiting, Lark was roving far into the back corners of the warren of pods in an attempt to stay away from the other Thenardiers. And that was where she ran into Feuilly.

He still lived in the pod he'd shared with his mother, but it was old and run down, and the light had stopped working, so it was dark fifty percent of the time. And of course it was also empty. So he'd been spending a lot of his free time--when he wasn't working in the mining center--out in the common hallways and the port.

But he quickly realized that most people--while they vaguely cared about him and would help him out if he was sick or really hungry--didn't want to actually _see_ him. Maybe he was too vivid a reminder of how easily a family could fall apart from poverty and sickness. Maybe he was just an annoying little boy.

Whatever the reason, Feuilly had picked up on the stiffness in people's smiles whenever he was around, the way their conversations stuttered and their eyes skipped over his face, and he'd started trying to find somewhere else to spend the few hours between when the mining center closed and when it was time to go to sleep. The old storage rooms--dark and empty, but with an emptiness full of mysterious echoes instead of the silence left behind after the ending of an off-key song--were the best the colony could offer.

They were aware of each others' presence in the storeroom long before either of them dared to speak to the other. The big, dark room had been used, two generations ago, to store crates of medical supplies; one generation ago, it'd been a dumping ground for worn-out lengths of rubber tubing and other garbage. Now, with even the trash picked over, there was nothing in the storeroom but a few scraps of plastic, and the slightest sound echoed in the darkness. The walls threw back every tap of Feuilly's hands against the wall, every murmur of Lark's half-hummed song, filling the room with them.

Still, used to others resenting their presence, the two children stayed on opposite sides of the room, finding contentment in being left alone to amuse themselves. It was almost a week before Feuilly cautiously crossed the storeroom floor, tiptoeing up to the beam from a skylight where Lark was making shapes with the shadows of her hands.

"I can do a rat. Wanna see?" Feuilly offered.

Lark froze, her thin shoulders going rigid under the dusty jumpsuit. Then she looked Feuilly over, nodded, and scooted aside. She nodded solemnly as Feuilly cupped his hands together to make a shadow in the shape of a rat.

"We got rats in the ship once." She shuddered. "They were nasty."

"You didn't like them?" Feuilly asked, surprised. "We got rats here, a few times. They didn't last long before they all got eaten."

Lark wrinkled her nose. "Ours were nasty because She put poison out for them, and then they died in little far-back places, and they smelled bad, and I had to crawl in and get them out."

Feuilly shifted his hands in the beam of light. "Okay, how about an old man?"

Lark giggled appreciatively at the big hooked nose he'd given the figure, and brought up her hands to try to imitate it. Once she got it, she made the shadow's mouth move, and supplied a creaky old-man voice to match it.

The shadow-faces told jokes and argued and sang in a horribly off-key caterwaul for a quarter of an hour before Lark asked, "What's your name?"

"It's . . . it's . . . Uncle Crumbly, um, Crumbly Whiskers," Feuilly warbled.

"No, I mean your real name, yours." She let her hands fall to motion at Feuilly.

"Oh. It's Feuilly. What's yours?"

"Lark."

"How old are you?"

"I'm seven."

"I'm nine."

They were quiet for a minute, each of them looking at the other with a timid beginning of a smile. Then Lark asked, "Do you know how to play the clapping game?"

"What clapping game?"

"The one that goes 'She drinks Coca-cola, you drink Topical, she wears mini-falda, you wear long pants . . .' Do you know it?"

Feuilly shook his head. "I never heard that one." When her face fell, he added, "but you can teach me."

"I will! I know it real well," she assured him, "I've watched Eponine and Zelle play it a million times." She held out her hands to meet his.

For a year, they played together in the abandoned storerooms, in the shadowy hallways where all the bulbs had burned out, in the heap of big fan blades and solar panel frames and other refuse that even Gideon's frugal inhabitants couldn't make work any longer--in all the unwanted, forgotten spaces of the little moon colony. They couldn't see each other every day; Feuilly had to put in his time at the mining center to earn his weekly vitamin tablet and protein cakes, and the Thenardiers sometimes set Lark to work at odd times, cleaning the ship or disassembling another piece of machinery that they were going to sell for parts. But when they had a moment of free time to steal--after the mining machines shuddered to a halt at the end of the day, or when a spill filled the mining center with chemicals and everything had to be shut down to be cleaned, or when the Theardiers forgot about Lark's existence for a few hours--they would creep away to the dark, abandoned corridors where they could run around and laugh freely for a few minutes.

  
  


Things weren't always good, of course.

There was the day when Lark showed up at the entrance to the mining center, wearing boots with the soles flapping off and goggles that covered half her face. Her bottom lip trembled as she looked around at the huge, noisy machinery and the throng of people carrying, sorting, lifting, shouting--but she set her mouth and stumbled over to the boss to ask to be given work.

All that day, Lark darted around the machines, picking up the chunks of rock that had gone flying off in the wrong direction or slipped out of someone's bucket, running them across in a bucket of her own to the sorting stations. She was the smallest child there, by a good two hands, and she could only carry a bucket half full, but she worked like the world would end if she stopped for a moment.

"They're thinking about--about getting rid of me," Lark whispered to Feuilly as they found themselves in line together to get their buckets weighed. "I hear them arguing at night. She's been saying it for years, but a few nights ago, he started talking about it. He's never said it before."

"Getting rid of you?"

"Like, to the slip ships," Lark explained. "I'm nearly big enough."

Feuilly frowned. He knew what the apple girls and party boys--or service workers, if you were being polite--did, and though he was young enough that the whole thing didn't make a lot of sense to him, he understood that all that stuff was serious adult business, and not supposed to be for children. And he knew that the people who came off the slip ships always looked really skinny and tired--and a little bit sad, underneath the too-friendly smiles.

"They shouldn't do that," he said, the words sounding so obviously powerless, even to his own ears, that he flinched.

"They decided to try me here first." Lark shifted her grip on the bucket handle. "If I can bring in some money, or at least some food--prove that I'm useful--maybe they'll stop talking about it."

Feuilly was already too old to try to to tell her that it was going to be all right, to reassure her that she could definitely keep herself safe. But as the line shuffled toward the weighing station, he tipped half his bucket into hers.

  
  


There was also the day when Feuilly didn't go to the mining center--when he didn't get as far as crawling off his little pallet.

This happened from time to time; something--a dream, a whiff of some smell, a woman calling far down the corridor--would spark a memory, and without warning the grief would hit him like a punch to the stomach. He'd be left silent and still, unable to shake it off, unable to see the _point_ in pushing on when his mother was just a handful of ashes tossed out onto the surface of Gideon. What was there for him, if in the whole of the great big universe, _she_ did not exist anymore?

He was only nine, after all--and she had been dead less than a year.

Curled up in his bed, the thin blanket pulled up over his ears like a shelter, trembling with--not cold, but something else--Feuilly didn't hear the knock on his door, didn't realize anyone was there at all until she'd let herself in and was standing in front of him.

"Feuilly? Are you okay? You didn't come to the mining center this morning, and I was worried."

When he didn't answer, Lark came closer (the soles of her ragged shoes _slap-slap_ ing on the floor) and crouched down beside the bed. "What's the matter?" she asked, her voice soft. "Are you sick?"

Teeth clenched, Feuilly shook his head. He _should_ be sick, he thought; it would make sense. How could he be healthy and fine when something so bad had happened? How could he just go on with life like normal?

Lark's jumpsuit rustled as she sat down next to the bed. A moment later, her slender fingers brushed over Feuilly's hair.

As if the touch had unlocked his tongue, Feuilly choked out, "I--I miss my Mama."

"Ohhh, Feuilly," Lark murmured. She patted his back as he started to cry, the sobs that always seemed to be waiting just below the surface now welling up.

When he had finished, she asked softly, "What happened to her? Did she go away?"

Feuilly nodded, then shook his head. "She got sick. They say it like she went away, they say things like 'she left us,' or 'she's passed on,' but it's not true--she's not anywhere. She's just dead. Why do they say it like that?"

"I don't know." Lark brushed a hand over his hair. "It's more confusing that way."

"I wish she was somewhere," Feuilly muttered quietly. "Even if she wasn't here, if she was somewhere."

"But she didn't go away from you on purpose. If she could have stayed, she would have."

"Yeah. She would have. If she could. She just got so sick."

"My Mama . . ." Lark trailed off, leaving the sentence hanging.

Feuilly realized he'd never known what had happened to Lark's parents--her real parents; it was unclear what the Thenardiers were, but they obviously weren't her mother and father. "Did your Mama die too?" he asked her.

She shook her head. "I don't think so. She just left me."

"Why?"

Lark shrugged. "I don't know. _She_ \--" (she never referred to the Thenardiers by name) "--always says my mother didn't want me, because I'm so little and useless. But I was just a baby, so how could she know I'd be this way when I got to be seven? _She_ doesn't always tell the truth when she talks to me, so it could be a lie. But I don't know why my mother would leave me with Them if she did care about me. Maybe she didn't want a kid at all--a little one or a big one."

"I'm sorry," Feuilly said, still sniffing back his own tears.

She shrugged again, scratching her nose. "I don't mind. I never really had a Mama, so I don't miss her. It would be worse if I had one, and then I lost her." She patted his shoulder again. "That would be the saddest thing."

  
  


One night, Lark came running to Feuilly's dark little habitation pod, trembling and crying. One of her eyes was already swollen half shut, and she cradled her wrist gingerly against her chest. She shied away from Feuilly's hands when he attempted to hug her, but climbed onto his bed and sat huddled in the farthest corner of the pod, knees pulled up to her chest.

"I didn't take them," she whispered in the darkness, as Feuilly hovered over her, not sure what to do. "I'm so hungry, but I never, never took them. It was Eponine. And she knows I know, she saw me watching, and she looked right at me and went on anyway. Because she knew They'd blame me for it."

"What did she take?"

"Protein cakes," Lark sniffled. "She keeps eating them out of the box on the bottom of the cupboard, underneath all the other boxes, and today when She pulled out the box there were only two left, and She said I was a thief and a little bitch and not worth the food they give me already and They should have thrown me out the airlock months ago and I was so _scared._ "

"That's horrible," Feuilly managed. He felt like he was suffocating, hearing this. It was so bad, and there was so little he could do.

"And I couldn't even tell them it was Eponine," she sobbed, "because that would just make it worse, it always does. So I didn't say anything, I didn't--but She still hit me anyway, and when she stopped for a minute I ran away, I was so scared--do you think she'll be mad because I left? She _will_ be, won't she? I shouldn't have left; I should go back right now." She pushed herself up, still trembling, and moved toward the door. Then she stopped.

"There's not going to be enough protein cake," she said quietly. "We're going to run out. Eponine ate so much of them, and now there's only five boxes left, and who knows when the next ship will come?" She sank quietly to the ground. Feuilly crouched down beside her, and she leaned against his shoulder. "I'm so hungry already," she whispered.

"I'll share mine with you," he promised. "I still have almost a whole box left. We're little, we'll make them last." He put an arm around her, and this time she didn't shrink away from the touch.

"I have to go back," she said again, pushing herself to her feet even as she still clung to his shirt. "She'll be angry."

"I'll see you in the morning," Feuilly told her as he followed her to the door. "At work. I'll bring some food with me. And we'll be at work all day long--and They never come into the mining center, you know."

Lark turned in the doorway, a watery little half-smile on her face. "They don't, do They?"

And it wasn't enough--not nearly enough for the huge, busting desire in Feully's chest to make things _okay_ , to keep Lark safe and fed and warm and happy, to see her laugh and sing. But it was all he could do, and he had to be content with that.

* * *

Feuilly shook himself out of his reverie. There was no point in dredging up things that had happened twelve years ago. Lark was gone; Ep was here now and she was giving them information that could be vitally important to their planet's future.

Or she had been--by the time Feuilly had dragged himself back to the present, Ep had finished describing the Class-VR planets and the others were discussing what she'd shared and what it could mean for Beta Caeli A.

"If upgrading means turning out like Bellerophon, we _are_ better off leaving the copper in the ground," Courfeyrac said. "Imagine living in a place like that, where you're only valuable because you're cheaper to fuel and easier to replace than a mining robot, and where the Colonial Authority owns _everything_."

"Them or the Four Families," Marius pointed out. "I never thought of it before, but of course, valuable resources would also draw the attention of criminals."

"But we know it doesn't have to turn out that way, because look at Kepler-62 F," Bossuet said. "Just think how a school system like that would change things here!"

"I wish we knew how they ended up the way they are," Enjolras said. "Do you think . . . is it worth using a satphone?"

Bahorel laughed. "You're burning a phone just to find out why one planet's nicer than another? It's probably just dumb luck, just like anything else."

Enjolras was already pulling his satphone out of his pocket. "There might be a reason," he said defensively. "And if there is one, knowing it will help us know what to do to keep Beta Caeli A on a positive track. I'm willing to sacrifice my phone for the future of the planet."

"He might be right, and we'll ruin your phone for nothing," Jehan allowed. "But if we don't try, I think we'll always wonder what we might have found out if we did."

"You type," Enjolras said, handing the phone to Jehan. "You're faster than me."

"What should I put?"

"Try 'history of Kepler-62 F,'" Musichetta suggested. "And do Bellerophon, too. And if you have time before the downloads time out, try searching each planet's name plus 'economic system.'"

Jehan took a deep breath, wiggled his fingers to warm them up, and then started tapping frenetically at the satphone's screen. The others waited as he scanned the search results and started pulling up pages, downloading files to read more carefully later, after the phones data connection had snapped off and the device had died.

"Why do they do that, anyway?" Courfeyrac asked. "I always wondered, you know?--what's the point of having a feature on the phone that just breaks it?"

"Planned obsolescence," Bahorel said. "If they didn't die, nobody would ever buy a new phone."

"It's because they're stolen," Ep spoke up.

"What do you mean? I bought it in a store," Enjolras protested.

"All the ones in the stores are stolen," Ep explained patiently, as if it were obvious. "They steal them from rich people on the inner planets, and then they sell them here. And as long as you're only using on-planet networks, like calling and messaging people on BCA, you can get away with it, because nobody knows where the phone is. But the second you connect to satellite data, the phone shows up where it's not supposed to be, and the company shuts it down."

"So that's why?" Courfeyrac asked. "All our devices are fugitives from the law, and if we use the internet, we get caught?"

Enjolras's mouth twisted. "So all the phones are stolen?"

"Pretty much," Ep said. "Sometimes they pick them up from the trash. You didn't know that?"

"Here--listen to this," Jehan broke in. "'When silicon was discovered on Kepler-62 F, twelve years into the planet's development, the colonists petitioned the Colonial Authority for self-administration status. The planet was officially designated a self-administrered colony in Year 13, and further development of the resource deposits was coordinated by the newly-elected administration board.' Does this 'self-administration status' sound like something we want to look into?"

"Yes. Yes, look that up," Musichetta said instantly.

Jehan typed in another search and started pulling up documents from deep in Colonial Authority websites. The phone lasted another fifteen minutes before the data connection went out--long enough for the group to learn that certain colonies were granted more autonomy in determining how their natural resources were developed and processed, a status known as "self-administration." A lot of these colonies' revenue from resources still went to the Colonial Authority, but they managed the production of that revenue themselves, and had a large measure of control of their own internal affairs. A colony with newly discovered valuable resources could apply for self-administration status by filing a petition with the Colonial Authority at the same time that the confirmation of the resources was sent to the central Colonial Authority offices.

It seemed like an ideal solution (almost too good to be true) to Feuilly, as well as to many of the others in the group. The question was whether Beta Caeli A had the infrastructure and management expertise to be able to handle the task--and whether they could convince the Colonial Authority that it did.

"We have to at least _try,"_ Courfeyrac said finally. "Maybe it'll all fall through, maybe the Colonial Authority will just laugh in our faces. But if that happens, we're no worse off than if we hadn't asked." There were nods and murmurs of agreement all around the table.

"But it has to come from the whole planet, or at least the whole city," Enjolras said. "Something like this needs everyone behind it if it's going to work--and if we don't have that, there's no point in anyone approaching the Colonial Authority about it."

"How could anyone _not_ support it?" Joly's eyes were bright with excitement. "We get the revenue and the tech we need so badly, _and_ we get more power over our own destiny. It's the perfect idea."

"Well, it does seem a lot harder and more time-consuming than letting the Colonial Authority handle everything," Bossuet pointed out. "And if your children are hungry _now_ , you don't have a lot of patience."

"But _we_ have the copper--and if you have what everyone wants, things generally happen for you in a hurry." Courfeyrac grinned. "We can definitely make a good case for it. What's more a problem is _how_ to make that case to enough people, quickly enough, to

"Word of mouth won't be enough?" Bahorel asked, then immediately answered himself. "No, information gets lost and twisted around too quickly. And everyone will want to talk about the copper, but 'self-administered colony status' sounds a lot less exciting."

"Could we write something?" Enjolras suggested. "We could post it in several public places."

"Not enough people can read," Musichetta pointed out. "We could read it aloud--or just stand on street corners and shout. But again, everyone will hear the part about copper and the important part of the message will get ignored or lost in the noise."

"What about the emergency broadcast system?" Jehan asked. "It reaches everyone all at once."

"It'd be perfect, if we had access to it," Enjolras agreed. He turned to Marius. "Is there any way?"

Marius frowned. " _I_ don't have access to it. My job is preparing and cataloging audio files; other people do the actual broadcasting. And the building is card-locked, and I think there's a guard, even at night." He swirled the dregs of his drink thoughtfully. "But . . . there's a balcony on the tower. I see them out there eating their lunches on nice days. If we could get up there, I don't think that door is secured."

Bahorel and Bossuet exchanged a look, then got up and collected the empty dishes from the tables; on their way back from dropping them off at the counter, they took the long way around the cafeteria, slowing to a stroll along the open wall on the side of the building that faced the Colonial Authority building. Feuilly tried not to watch them obviously, but the conversation at the table had dissentegrated into meaningless chatter meant to fill the silence so they wouldn't attract attention. Jehan and Joly were talking about the report of a late-season flu outbreak in one of the outlying cities; Ep was staring with poorly disguised jealousy as Marius practiced his Chinese with Musichetta. Courfeyrac sent his fried protein chips around the table again, urging someone to help him out, come on, they shouldn't go to waste.

"We think it's climbable," Bahorel reported as they slid back into their seats, and the fake conversations shut down instantly. "Boss should probably be the one to go up, though; there's a window we could go through if the door turns out to be card-locked after all, but it looks pretty small. I'm not sure I can get through it."

"Can we get a rope?" Marius wanted to know. "I'll need to go up too, and, let's be honest, I probably can't climb it."

"Can't you just tell me which button to push?" Bossuet asked.

Marius stared at him. "There's probably twenty or thirty different buttons--and dials and switches, et cetera," he said flatly. "Plus, all the _real_ work happens on the computer, which means you'll have to--"

Bossuet raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, yes, you're right. I was just trying to simplify things."

"I can borrow a rope from work," Courfeyrac offered. "If it's just for one night, it won't be missed."

"Wear gloves," Ep said. When Marius looked at her quizically, she explained, as if it was obvious: "For the fingerprints? That's how they catch you."

"All right," Enjolras said. "So Bossuet and Marius will go up in the tower and broadcast the message--we need to put together something for them to broadcast."

"I can write the first draft," Courfeyrac offered, "if you want to make edits, Jehan?"

"Do we have time for everyone to review it?" Enjolras asked. "It'd be good to get a range of perspectives--especially from the members of our group who aren't upper-class males."

"We'll have to do it quickly," Marius reminded them. "The confirmation tests should be done in three days, and then they'll be contacting the Colonial Authority right away. I mean, unofficially, the authority already knows. So if we want to have any influence, we really need to get the message out . . . tomorrow night?"

After a little more discussion, it was decided that Courfeyrac and Enjolras would write the script for the message together that night. They'd create several copies of the first draft that could be distributed to the others throughout the next day: Courfeyrac would read it to Bossuet and Feuilly at work, Enjolras would send a copy to the clinic with Jehan for him and Joly to read, and so on. Then as soon as the work day was over, Jehan would combine their changes into a final draft, which Bahorel and Musichetta would read for the actual recording. If they worked fast, Marius could have the file edited and converted into the appropriate format by sunset--in time for him and Bossuet to go up the tower by the low light of dusk, before the moons rose.

With those plans made, the meeting broke up--Enjolras and Courfeyrac hurrying off to start their long night of writing, everyone else heading home to attempt to get in a good night's sleep.

As Feuilly was wrapping up the leftover food Enjolras had urged on him, Ep appeared at his elbow, tugging him aside.

"It's Jondrette now," she said in a low voice. "Not Thenardier. We had some trouble and . . ." She trailed off. "Can you just remember not to say the old name?

"Of course," Feuilly said automatically. "I'll remember." He wondered what kind of trouble it was, what had happened in the past ten years to replace "Thenardier" with "Jondrette" and turn Eponine from a selfish, carefree little girl in pigtails and fancy dresses to this twitchy, defiant young woman who wore the same ragged jacket even the middle of summer. He would probably never hear the story, he reflected: Everything about Ep's demeanor shouted _No questions._ So he didn't ask anything, even as the silence stretched out awkwardly.

"It wasn't my fault, you know," she said suddenly, staring fiercely down at the ground, the words muttered as if someone else was forcing her to speak. "When he--what--any of it."

"I know," Feuilly said, trying to make it sound sincere. "You were just a kid. We all were."

She nodded, then sighed. "I should have been nicer," she admitted. "I couldn't do a lot . . . but I didn't have to be mean. I should've tried."

"Maybe I should have, too," Feuilly offered. At the time, he hadn't understood what it must be like to be a favored child in a household where other children provided such a vivid example of what life could be if you lost that favored status; he'd seen only his best friend's hurt, and her sisters' apparent indifference. He'd never realized how scared Eponine must have been as well, how little real power she had in the household.

"I thought you were still mad at me," Ep said, looking up to meet his gaze. "When you didn't talk to me about anything--when you acted like you didn't know me."

"I wasn't--I didn't recognize you; I didn't mean to--"

"Yeah. I get that now." She smiled, but there was something sad in it. "Well. See you around, Feuilly."


	3. Chapter 3

The radio units in the bonded worker housing were all empty casings, long since gutted of their parts by workers or TEC itself, so Feuilly went to Courfeyrac's place to listen to the broadcast. He was late heading out, having been held up by a power outage in the TEC cafeteria where he collected his meals, and night was already falling by the time he reached the housing unit where Enjolras and Courfeyrac lived.

Enjolras opened the door almost the instant Feuilly knocked on it, and Feuilly guessed that he'd been pacing. (The faint sheen of sweat on his forehead, in spite of the refreshingly cool air inside their unit, confirmed it.) Courfeyrac was sitting at the table, eating dinner; he waved as Feuilly came in, but his clipped movements betrayed his own tension.

"Did everything go all right?" Feuilly asked.

Enjolras nodded. "The revising and recording took longer than we expected. But they have the file--and each of them has an extra copy, just in case--and they're on their way over now."

"They're going to play it at eight," Courfeyrac said. The radio was already on, faintly playing a stream of centuries-old Terran music in the background.

The tension mounted as the three of them counted down the minutes to eight o'clock, filling the time with whatever they could manage to focus on. Enjolras tried to talk to Feuilly about an educational project someone had started in the bonded workers' district, but he kept glancing at the clock and losing his train of thought. Courfeyrac kept looking out the window, even though the radio tower was hidden by buildings from this distance. Eight o'clock came, then five after. Ten after.

At 8:12, there was a sudden crackling over the radio and some muffled fumbling. Then Marius's voice came through, loud and clear, if a bit nervous-sounding: "Okay, it's ready. Do you have the--"

"Here."

"Give it to--"

There were more fuzzy sounds of movement, and a sudden, deep buzz, from something being plugged in.

"Come on, come on, come on," Enjolras was whispering under his breath. "Play it."

"Okay, just hit--" Marius said over the radio, when a loud bang sounded in the background. "What was that?"

"Who's in there?" a faint voice shouted. "What are you doing?"

"Shit, they--quick, press the--"

"Get out, get out!" Bossuet said urgently.

"But--"

"They can't find you here! Through the--yes, I'll--just _go!_ "

"What's going--" the stranger's voice called, much louder now, but then it was cut off by the harsh beep of the automatic emergency broadcast system.

"No! No, wait!" Enjolras was on his feet, staring stricken at the radio as the standard recording rolled out. "Not yet, I need to know what happened!"

"This is a test of the emergency broadcast system," a man with a decades-old accent announced. "Please be patient while we confirm the functioning of our equipment. In a real emergency, an important message would follow this brief announcement."

Bahorel's voice boomed dramatically out of the speakers. He announced the discovery of copper, and declared that now--for the first time in their history--the colonists on Beta Caeli A had the chance to really have a say in their own destiny. Musichetta came in next, briefly outlining the difference between an ordinary colony and a self-administered colony; between the two of them, they warned of the dangers of external control and described the benefits ordinary people could expect if the colony went the second route. Finally, Musichetta urged the people to make their voices heard and petition the Colonial Authority for the more independent status.

"Beta Caeli A is our home," she said fiercely. "We have the right to--" Her voice was cut off abruptly.

"They found it," Enjolras said. "But there was only about five seconds left; that's more than I thought we'd get out. I hope--" He left the sentence unfinished.

The radio played a loud stream of static for the longest minute Feuilly had ever lived. Enjolras started pacing again, glancing up at the radio every few seconds, as if looking at it would tell him something.

Then, suddenly, the sound snapped back to the old Terran music that had been playing earlier. They let it play for several minutes, but nothing changed, and Courfeyrac finally got up and switched it off.

For nearly an hour, they sat around the table, staring down at Courfeyrac's phone, waiting for the report that Marius and Bossuet had arrived safely back at Joly's, as planned. Ocassionally their tension broke out into brief, intense conversations as they went over little details of what they'd heard and what it might mean, before flaring out again into long periods of silence. Once, Enjolras stood up, decisively, ready to go out and find out what had happened--then changed his mind and sat back down again.

Feuilly nearly dropped his cup of water when the phone finally did ring. Courfeyrac had it in his hand before it could buzz a second time.

"Hello?" On the other end, Jehan's voice was its usual soft murmur, and Feuilly couldn't make out any words.

Courfeyrac's face wasn't losing any of its worried lines. "Shit . . . okay, yes . . . No, I don't think we can . . . They'll just send him to--okay, yes, we'll wait for his call . . . Bye."

He ended the call and met Enjolras's eyes, shaking his head. "Marius is fine; he went out the window while Bossuet delayed the night security. He's pretty sure nobody even saw him. But Bossuet never came down."

  
  


The news traveled fast. Even in the bonded worker district, where maybe one radio in fifty still worked, everyone was talking about the discovery of the copper the next morning. Feuilly even overheard the words "self-administered status" a few times as he eavesdropped on the conversations around him on his way to work. But all the furor they'd created, the spreading of the information that by rights belonged to the public, the satisfaction of seeing people considering their role in shaping their own destiny--it was cold comfort when Feuilly saw the empty half of his workbench in the shop that morning.

Diving into work couldn't help him cover up his worry when every minute was a reminder that Bossuet should have been there, and he wasn't. And no one even knew where he was: They hadn't been able to find out anything the evening before. Nobody had answered when they knocked on the doors of the Colonial Authority offices, and Courfeyrac's friend-of-a-friend in the local police force, grudingly scanning the arrest records, had said there'd been no new arrests that night. Bahorel and Marius had had to run away from the night security, so they hadn't been able to see where Bossuet had been taken.

It had been horrible to give up and go home, not knowing, and going to work like normal in the morning was worse. Feuilly wanted nothing more than to drop everything and go straight down to the police station and insist on answers. But if he left work without permission, he'd be back in Minerals Processing before he could blink, with a heavy load of fines on his account--and that was the best-case scenario. Never had he more thoroughly resented his bonded worker status.

Courfeyrac (who, as an independent worker, could skip work or pretend to be sick for a day or two without serious consequences) stopped by mid-morning to find Feuilly half inside a duct in a storeroom, scraping decades worth of grease and dust from a jammed-up fan blade.

"He's okay," was the first thing Courfeyrac said, and Feuilly let out the breath he'd been holding all morning. "Bahorel was right--the police were too lazy to do the paperwork so they just stuck him in the drunk tank for the night. He was charged with breaking and entering once the morning shift had the chance to get their coffee and check their messages."

"Breaking and entering," Feuilly repeated. "How serious is that?"

"We're not sure. Not too bad--not terrible, anyway. There'll be a fine, and he'll probably lose his job--through excessive absences if nothing else; the Colonial Authority courts can take _months_ to process even minor cases. In the meantime, he's being held in the prison on the north of the city, which isn't the most comfortable place, but supposedly it's not that bad, compared to what it's like in--in some parts of the city." He fell silent, leaving Feuilly wondering whether he'd been about to say "in the bonded workers district."

"There's a . . . _chance_ \--just a chance--that he could be sent off-world," Courfeyrac added quietly. He looked down at his hands. "I don't know how serious a possibility it is. But Jehan says it's happened in some cases in the past, for similar offenses. So they have that power, it's just a question of whether they're angry enough to use it."

"Anyway," he sighed, pushing himself to his feet. "I should get back. We're meeting tonight, the same place as before, to talk about what we can do for Bossuet. At five, or as soon as you can get there."

Feuilly ended up arriving late, an all too familiar situation; this time his boss had pulled him aside just after he clocked out to ask him to replace some faceplates that had been removed from machinery to get serial numbers for the third-cycle inventory. It was extra work, off the clock--and he _always_ was the one who got picked for tasks like this, so invariably that the boss had dropped any pretense of a random selection--but of course, saying anything about it would just get him sent back to Minerals Processing. So Feuilly just nodded, tight-lipped, and got to work as the other mechanics gathered up their things and left, talking and laughing and casting pitying or amused glances in his direction.

When he arrived at the cafeteria, the place was packed with people celebrating the news about the copper. He'd made two full circuits of the crowded room before he finally caught sight of Jehan, weaving through the mass of people with a tray of drinks held high above his head. He followed him to the two tables the Friends of BCA had claimed in time to hear Musichetta give what sounded like the third or fourth summary of her visit to the prison that afternoon.

"No word on a hearing date, and they won't let me see him," she said as Feuilly pulled up a chair in between Courfeyrac and Joly. "They say it's official policy, but we _know_ that's bullshit--maybe it is the policy, but they never stick to it like this. They're just mad because we made them look stupid."

"Do you think they're angry about the message itself, or just that we broke in and used their equipment?" Jehan wondered.

"Both, I'd say," Bahorel said. "We took away their chance to control how the news broke--and we gave a lot of people a jump on getting ready to mine the copper. Now, whether we get self-administration or not, the Authority will have a little smaller piece of that pie."

"You should lie low," Ep said to Musichetta. "You got lucky today--if they had recognized your voice from the message, you could be in trouble too."

"I didn't do anything illegal; I wasn't even there. What could they do?"

Ep snorted. "They don't care. They can find something--or make it look like you did something--or just make your life miserable in other ways. I bet there's something you're doing on your farm that doesn't have the right permits, or hasn't been reported the right way. Just--let somebody else visit him next time, is all I'm saying."

"Will they let us send Bossuet stuff?" Marius asked "The food in there is probably terrible, right?"

"More importantly, is there anything we can do to speed up the trial?" Bahorel asked. "It's not fair for them to drag their feet about it just because they're pissed off."

As Jehan passed cups of coffee and sandwiches around the tables, the group discussed possible solutions. Unfortunately, there wasn't much they could come up with beyond what they were already doing. Jehan agreed to look into the intersystem law codes and see if what was happening was an official violation of Bossuet's rights (not that it would make any difference if it was, in Bahorel's loudly-stated opinion), and it was decided that Joly would continue to the local police and Colonial Authority for more information. Beyond that, there wasn't a lot they could do but wait.

"We should also talk about our next steps for pushing for self-administration," Enjolras proposed.

"Wait, what?" Courfeyrac was half out of his seat. "Bossuet's locked up somewhere and they won't even let us in to see him. How can we think about the political stuff when our friend is going to be spending months in jail, or about to be shipped off to some other planet, or--or--we don't even _know!_ "

Enjolras held up a hand, placating. "We're all worried about Bossuet, but there's really not much we can do for him right now. We can't ignore everything else that's going on to just sit here while we wait for a breakthrough with Bossuet. And more importantly, what's the point of Bossuet getting arrested at all, if we're going to let what he gained through that sacrifice fall apart?"

"We have to make it worth it," Joly agreed, to Feuilly's surprise--he'd been gripping his mug, knuckles white, for the whole meeting. "We have to." Courfeyrac shut his mouth and sat down, but Feuilly could still feel the tension radiating off of him.

"And I think we can do it," Jehan said. "The message that we got out--thanks to Bossuet and Marius--really made a big impact. _Everyone's_ talking about the copper, and a lot of people are talking administration status too."

"Oh, hey!" Marius said, brightening. "So at the Authority offices today, there were--well, there were a _lot_ of people, all day long. But this afternoon, a group of women came in with a petition for Beta Caeli A to have self-administered status. And the office wouldn't actually accept it--I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with it--but they had a _bunch_ of signatures! I think someone said they had almost four hundred."

Bahorel gave a cheer, drawing--surprisingly--hardly any attention at all in the bustling cafeteria. "In less than 24 hours? That's incredible!"

"But you said the office wouldn't accept it?" Musichetta asked.

"No, it was--I don't know exactly, it was the wrong format or the wrong procedure or something. I don't work in that part of the office, so I don't have access to any of that information, this is just what I heard. But people were saying that the office set the group up with the right forms and everything. So they're going back out and they have to get, I think, a thousand signatures?"

"We have to find these women," Bahorel said. "I can get them fifty signatures from my neighborhood alone."

"I'll ask around," Jehan said, "see if anyone knows who they are."

"We should all try to make contact with them," Enjolras said. "And in the meantime, keep talking to people about it. The announcement was a great way to start this thing, but we can't expect it to keep going on its own--and since another broadcast is out of the question, we have to sustain this through word of mouth."

"So we should keep bringing up administration status when we're talking with people about the copper?" Muschetta asked. "Do we have a specific message we should be pushing, or are we just keeping people from forgetting about the possibility?"

"I think the message is just that self-administration would be best for all the people of Beta Caeli A. If anyone wants something more specific, I have the arguments we drafted when coming up with the message, let me know," Enjolras offered. "We wrote a lot more text than actually ended up in the recording. It might give you some ideas."

"But just keeping the conversation about administration status open is also good," Feuilly added. "Right? Not letting people forget about it, but leaving them free to make their own decisions?"

"People will support an idea more passionately if they made the decision to do so on their own," Enjolras agreed. "Of course, it's important to be ready with support for our view--and we _do_ hope everyone comes over to our side. But if our guiding idea is that the people of Beta Caeli A should be free to make their own decisions about what happens to them--then that has to start with this choice."

  
  


The next two days were a flurry of work and excitement. Feuilly spent every minute that he wasn't working or sleeping (or, occasionally, eating) trying to make self-administration a real possibility for the planet. He started conversations with the people who shared his living quarters, with the other mechanics, with the people whose machinery he was fixing. He went all around the bonded worker district, becoming more familiar with the area than he'd ever been before, trying to pick the best places to post the handful of leaflets--in text and pictorials--that Jehan had managed to sneak out on the clinic's printer.

Things were going really, really well. Everyone in the city seemed to be talking about self-administration, and the rumors about the petition kept growing, until the women were said to have five thousand signatures already. The second night after the message, someone painted the words "Our Planet, Our Choice" on the pavement in front of the Colonial Authority offices. The local news bulletins started talking about the movement. And Feuilly actually started to believe that maybe this would really happen.

Then, imperceptibly, they began losing ground. It was impossible to pin down how it had happened; nothing went terribly wrong, no new information emerged to change the situation, nobody really stood up to fight for the other side. But the fires of enthusiasm that had burned in St. Denis for the past forty-eight hours began to fade.

Conversations shifted to other subjects; people started looking bored more than interested when you brought up the colony's future. When the Friends of BCA finally made contact with the group with the petition, it turned out they only had about two hundred signatures. The third morning after the news broke, Feuilly woke up to find more people talking about the thunderstorm of the night before than about the future of the colony.

It didn't slow the work down--if anything, Feuilly found himself working harder, trying to save whatever it was they'd had before it died. He and Courfeyrac, armed with a section of the official petition paperwork, planted themselves by the doors of the mechanical division to collect signatures, then went out to work the neighborhoods nearby, walking until Feuilly's feet ached and his legs trembled with exhaustion and hunger, and his voice was hoarse from pleading with people to take just a minute to consider the petition.

All told, they got forty signatures.

The third night after the broadcast, they met in the cafeteria again, trying to figure out what to do about it all--trying to decide whether they'd lost already or not. Enjolras was still desperately, painfully hopeful that they could turn it all around; Bahorel was angry and dour, admitting defeat but unable to be philosophical about it; Jehan was twitching with sleep deprivation from all the late nights of research. Everyone in the group was somewhere on the continuum between the three extremes, with the added layer of anxiety from still not knowing what was going to happen to Bossuet. As for Feuilly . . . more than anything, he just felt exhausted. The past several days had been a huge rush of excitement and stress and hope, and now that was all fading away, leaving in its place just a bone-deep weariness.

Marius and Jehan were discussing the possibility of contacting news organizations outside of the Beta Caeli system--with scattered, half-hearted input from Musichetta and Courfeyrac--when Bossuet walked into the cafeteria.

Bahorel let out a yell; Jehan's mouth fell open. Joly knocked over his chair and fell sprawling into Marius's lap in his scramble to get up and hug Bossuet. Musichetta and Courfeyrac were close behind him.

"Are you all right?" Enjolras asked.

"What are you _doing_ here?" Bahorel said. "How did you get out?"

"Do you need someplace to hide?" Ep asked.

"No, no, I'm fine," Bossuet said. He stumbled--Musichetta was pulling him over toward the table, but Joly still hadn't released his grip around his waist--but caught himself on Courfeyrac's shoulder. "I'm a free man! They came in a couple of hours ago and told me the charges were being dropped--and then they just let me go."

"Oh thank God," Marius muttered, hiding his face in his hands.

"But what _happened_?" Musichetta asked, as the hugging and the relieved laughter settled down. "It's been three days, and they'd hardly tell us anything. What did they do to you?"

"Nothing, really," Bossuet said. "I had a room of my own--well, okay, a cell, but it wasn't that bad. Different people kept calling me out to their offices so they could ask me questions. Mostly, they wanted to know who was working with me and where we got our information from.

"You're in the clear," he assured Marius, grinning. "They know someone from the Colonial Authority was probably involved--because we knew about the copper, and because we knew how to access the public broadcast system. But they have no idea who. They couldn't find any fingerprints." He winked at Ep, who smirked and tossed her head as if to say _well of course_. (Feuilly glanced back at her a minute later, once the attention was back on Bossuet, to find her looking down at her hands, cheeks pink, a shy smile on her face.)

"And then they just let me go. I mean, they gave me a nice little lecture about all the things they _could_ have me charged me with, and warnings about what they would do if I ever pulled anything like this again." He shrugged. "Not that intimidating when you caught a guy in the act of trespassing and just let him walk away."

"They just let you go," Courfeyrac repeated. He glanced around nervously. "That seems . . . that's not what we expected. Are you sure they didn't follow you or something?"

"I'm not one hundred percent, but I'm pretty confident. I was careful, coming here; took a long way through the south district, checked to make sure there was nobody behind me. I even asked this little kid I ran into to double around behind me and watch--nothing. I think we're in the clear."

"Something's wrong." Enjolras frowned. "Why would they just let you get away with breaking into their building, when there's a straightforward legal charge and punishment? We hijacked their equipment--we used it to broadcast a message challenging their authority over this planet! How can they just let that go?"

"I think they want to keep it quiet," Bossuet said. "That's my theory, anyway. And--well, there aren't _no_ conquequences. I've missed three days of work now without excuse, so I'm automatically fired. But if that's the worst that comes of getting caught breaking and entering on government property . . ." He laughed. "I'm a lucky man."

"I think you really are," Jehan said slowly, shaking his head in disbelief. He blew out a long sigh. "I-- _really_ \--wasn't expecting things to turn out so . . . okay."

"We're really glad you're safe," Courfeyrac agreed. "We've all been worried sick about you." Joly, still stuck to Bossuet's side, nodded fervently.

"Sorry," Bossuet said. He squeezed Joly's shoulders with the arm still wapped around him. "But everything's okay now, right?"

"Everything's _the best_ ," Joly said--and even though the sentence might not have made grammatical sense, Feuilly found himself agreeing with it all the same.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for child abuse, including referenced sex trafficking (Thenardiers again)

 

Feuilly woke the next morning feeling more relaxed than he had in days. Bossuet was safe. Self-administration wasn't going to happen, it seemed--you couldn't force an entire city to change their minds--but there was something calming, too, about the admission of defeat. They could stop to breathe. They could go back to life as normal.

At the TEC cafeteria, Feuilly ended up in line behind Irina, a bonded worker who taught in the makeshift neighborhood school that met in the housing unit across from Feuilly's.

"I thought you'd be dancing for joy today," she said, turning around to chat with him as the line shuffled to a halt.

"Wait, why?" Feuilly asked. He didn't think she knew about Bossuet--he hadn't mentioned him to anyone, and he certainly hadn't had time to tell anyone he was back and unharmed.

"Self administration?" she prompted. "Didn't you see the posters?"

Feuilly looked where she was pointing. There were new TEC posters on the walls over in the seating area of the cafeteria, but he hadn't paid them much attention. The bright blue writing was all in text, and the single line of pictographs underneath didn't help either--most of the characters he knew represented mechanical and electrical terms, so a lot of normal pictorials were just as illegible to Feuilly as regular text. The picture on the poster showed an orange and brown globe--Beta Caeli A, judging from the landforms--with a stylized worker proudly straddling a mountain range.

"What do they say?" Feuilly asked Irina.

"The writing at the top says, 'TEC supports a self-administered Beta Caeli A,'" Irina told him, walking backwards as the line began moving faster. "I can't read the stuff at the bottom; we're too far away. But it looks like you've got this in the bag, if the big guys are in on it."

"Wow," Feuilly said. He stared hard at the blue lettering, willing the symbols to make sense to him, so he could read it himself--and maybe, that way, be able to actually believe it. "Wow, that's--that's great."

Irina turned back around to get her food. "I hope so."

"No, really, it's amazing!" Feuilly hurried after her, all the things he'd let himself forget crowding bck into his mind. "If we get self administration, we'll have a voice in the colony's laws, even the bonded workers, and we could change some things. We might--I just thought of this yesterday--we might even be able to get some of the copper money to set up schools."

"Really." Irina sounded doubtful, but she waited for Feuilly to catch up.

"Why not? The Colonial Authority brought in all the housing and builds roads and the spaceport--all the things everybody needs and gets something good from. Why not schools?"

" _I_ 'm not going to argue that education doesn't benefit everyone," Irina said, sliding into a seat at one of the battered tables, "but you really think the Colonial Authority believes that?"

"That's the whole point of self-administration--what the Colonial Authority believes won't matter. If we make the rules, we could decide for ourselves that the planet will be a better place if children have the chance to learn to read and do math and science. We'd still have to argue for it, but we'd be trying to convince the administration board--people right here in this city, people you could go up and talk to. We'd actually have a chance of getting heard."

"Hmm." Irina chewed her last bit of protein cake thoughtfully. "You still have those papers you were taking around the other day?"

"Yes--right here!" Feuilly dug the crumpled gray sheets out of his back pocket, where he'd left them more by indifference than out of any hope of getting the signatures he needed. "Here." He flattened the plastic out and pushed it across the table to her.

Irina pressed her thumb to the next blank space on the document--and now Feuilly had forty-one signatures.

  
  


Feuilly saw more and more posters as he went through the city, moving from the bonded workers' district to the more industrial areas, where more people who could read worked. He couldn't read any of them, but each one had the characters for "self-administration" that he'd memorized from the first one. Attached to a few of them were envelopes full of small flyers, and he took one, thinking he'd ask someone at work to read it to him.

When he walked into the office, however, he saw a stranger slouching on the bench where Bossuet belonged, and he remembered: Bossuet had lost his position, and of course they would have replaced him. Which meant that Feuilly had to tread carefully at work now. He'd been in Mechanical for some time now; he worked hard, and the boss liked him because Feuilly couldn't refuse any job, and Feuilly had _probably_ proved his usefulness by this point. But if his partner complained about him . . . well, it would still be a lot easier to send Feuilly back to Minerals Processing than to convince the contracted worker to try to get along with a stupid piece of moon trash who didn't even know how to read.

He shoved the flyer into his pocket and approached the workbench. The new mechanic looked up, grinned tentatively, and held out his hand.

"You must be the partner. I'm Grantaire."

Feuilly shook his hand, trying not to let his dismay show on his face--the man had lost part or all of three out of the five fingers on that hand. That wasn't a great sign. "I'm Feuilly."

"So we're on HVAC?"

"Sort of. We get a lot of machinery repair tickets, though, because those are priority, and when the machinery maintenance teams can't keep up with them--which is usually--they route over all the ones for engine ventilation and cooling systems . . . really, anything with a fan in it, or a motor."

"I can handle that. Really, I'd rather work on the machinery than buildings--all the ducts and whatnot. When you're in there, slithering along on your belly, trapped inside a tube--and maybe you're a mile under the surface, all that rock hanging over you--tangled up in plastic so tight around your shoulders that you can't scratch your ass . . . you realize how unnatural it all is, the buildings and the mines and everything. Man wasn't made to crawl around in ducts."

"Mm-hm," said Feuilly, who in three years of HVAC had needed to actually crawl through ducts maybe twice.

"But machines--there's a different story! Machines are our towering colossuses, our giants of industry, the--the dinosaurs of our domination over nature! That's when you can believe that we were meant to fill the earth--or the near-system habitable-with-modification-class planet--and subdue it, when you see a tiny little man operating a monster of iron and steel, ripping a chasm into a mountain. And the mechanic poking around under the hood--well, he's got the heart of the beast in his hands, he holds the power over--"

Grantaire's rant was cut off by the arrival of the boss with the day's tickets. Feuilly wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

"We've got one other thing here, too," the boss said. He handed Feuilly a clipboard with a document in dull gray plastic.

"What's this?" Feuilly asked, hoping the question would be interpreted as laziness when confronted with paperwork rather than inability to understand the text. (Reading text wasn't a job requirement, it _wasn't--_ but this was one more situation where one's technical rights didn't have a lot of relevance to reality.)

Fortunately, the boss didn't seem surprised by the question. "It's for that self-administration thing," the boss explained. "What all the posters and announcements this morning are about. Just put your mark--under 'the undersigned.'"

"It's a petition?" The document looked different from the one Feuilly had in his back pocket, but now that the boss had identified it, he thought he saw some similiarities.

He shrugged. "I guess. They're sending it around all the departments."

"I've already signed a petition. I don't think I can sign again. All the signatures have to be unique, they don't count if--."

The boss wasn't convinced. "I think they want everyone's signature on this one. Just sign again, okay?"

Feuilly hesitated, then carefully pressed his thumb to the document. He handed the clipboard to Grantaire, who added his off-center thumbprint in the next box without even glancing at the form.

"Here you go, boss!" he said cheerfully, handing it back. "It's good to know that even we tiny little worker ants have our role to play in the cosmic chess games of the Great and Powerful, isn't it?"

"Yeah, whatever," the boss said. "Just more paperwork, if you ask me--that's all this self-administration thing is going to be."

"There's always paperwork," Grantaire agreed. "It's the one thing you can depend on in life." The boss cracked a smile as he moved on to the next pair of workers to get their marks.

Feuilly wasn't sure what to think. All of a sudden, it seemed like self-administration was a done deal, the petition just an administrative formality with the weight of TEC behind the movement, the collection of support just more busywork from the Human Capital division. To all appearances, they had won--but for some reason it felt like losing.

  
  


"This can't be really real," Courfeyrac kept insisting when the Friends of BCA met that evening to talk about what had happened. "TEC-- _TEC_ , the huge corporation that has trapped thousands of workers in an exploitative debt slavery arrangement, that houses its labor in conditions that are _barely_ humane, that sucks hundreds of tons of ore out of the planet every year to fill the corporate accounts, the corporation we've been talking about fighting on its blatant human rights abuses-- _TEC_ is now coming out in favor of independence, and the, the right of individual human beings to have some control over their lives? This is just a really weird dream, right?"

"Somebody pinch him," Musichetta suggested.

Courfeyrac flung out an arm. "Pinch away, because I am about forty percent sure none of this is actually happening."

"I'm a little uneasy about it," Joly admitted. "The idea of TEC doing something good for the planet . . . I can't help but feel there's something going on that we don't see."

"But it makes sense," Marius protested.

Courfeyrac stared at him. "How, Marius? How does the biggest slave owner in the system supporting individual freedoms make any sense at all?"

"Economically, it makes sense," Marius insisted. "They don't want the extra income going to the Colonial Authority either. And they say so, too: If you look at what they say in their flyers, underneath all the language about autonomy and freedom, they show their hand. They say--I can't remember the exact words, but something about free markets, and . . . and

Jehan spread out one of the flyers on the table in front of him, shoving cups and trays to the side, and skimmed through it, reading snatches of the text aloud. "'As a Beta Caeli A-based company, we recognize the importance of local management, of directors who understand the unique' et cetera, et cetera . . . 'The resources of Beta Caeli A belong to all its inhabitants'--I wrote that line, the thieves--'and we believe that every resident of this planet should have free access to these resources.' Ah, yes, there it is. 'The inhabitants of Beta Caeli A have worked hard to make this planet a competitive and productive place, home to a robust free market and innovative local developers, and we believe that this culture of excellence should be preserved. Therefore, the Beta Caeli System Transport and Excavation Corporation supports the movement for a self-administered Beta Caeli A.'"

Bahorel was nodding slowly. "TEC is already the biggest player on BCA; the status quo is great for them. If the Colonial Authority moves in, they're looking at more regulation, more competition--maybe not even having access to the resources. If we administer the development of the copper ourselves, they know they're getting a big piece of it."

"Okay," Courfeyrac admitted. "I guess it does make sense." He sighed. "I still don't like it--taking anything from TEC. But I guess even big bad multiplanetary corporations can sometimes end up on the good side."

"Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?" Musichetta asked. "TEC is huge, but in the end it's just a business. They don't _actually_ control people--or the Colonial Authority. We don't even know if anyone's going to manage to submit an application and petition. When we counted last night we were about fifteen hundred signatures short."

"Oh, they will," Feuilly assured her. "They've already started a petition of their own--the supervisors were bringing it around this morning, telling everyone to sign. There's no way they won't get enough signatures--the bonded workers alone would be enough. And no bonded worker is going to say 'sorry, boss, my political beliefs don't align with that, I'd rather not sign.' They've probably submitted it already."

"That doesn't seem right," Enjolras said, frowning. "Nobody should sign a petition under coercion. The whole point of the process is to give people a voice, to measure how much support there is for an action. I don't want this to go through--no matter how much I believe in the cause--simply because people were afraid of losing their jobs if they didn't support it."

"But the process is a sham to begin with," Bahorel pointed out, "because we shouldn't even _need_ a petition. People should have a right to administer their own planet without having to sign a petition. When the existence of the system is unjust to begin with, I don't see a problem with TEC screwing with it."

"More importantly, perhaps," Bossuet added, "there's nothing we can do about it, even if the process isn't what we'd like. TEC is TEC, there's no stopping this. And self-administration _is_ a good thing, it's what we've been hoping and working for. So . . . maybe we should just sit back and let the process take its course and--and maybe even _relax_ for a bit?"

"Relax? I'm not sure I know what that word means," Enjolras said, straight-faced. But as Joly doubled over with laughter, he couldn't suppress the twitch of his lips.

  
  


For the next few weeks, as they waited for the Colonial Authority to confirm the planet's VR status and to consider the self-administration application, Feuilly's life returned mostly to normal. The Friends of BCA went back to their relief work in the struggling districts, and they occasionally met in the cafeteria to eat and talk--"for old times' sake," as Courfeyrac said. Despite everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen, for the time being, the world seemed just as it always had been.

The one big difference in Feuilly's life was Bossuet's absence at work. Feuilly didn't realize how much he'd enjoyed working with Bossuet--how much he looked forward to his friend's easy smile at the beginning of the day, how much lighter the work felt with Bossuet's laughter in his ear, how good it was to have someone who treated him as an equal and not an illiterate, stupid bonded worker. Bossuet, in his quiet, easygoing way, had slipped into Feuilly's life without Feuilly noticing how important he'd become to him--until he wasn't there anymore.

Still, his replacement turned out to be a pretty decent person to work with--even if he wasn't Bossuet. Grantaire talked a lot, and half of what he said was nonsense--or was so packed full of allusions to old stories and films that Feuilly had never heard of that it was as good as gibberish, to Feuilly at least--but that was all right with Feuilly His own tongue didn't run on overdrive like that, compelled to be moving all the time, so he didn't mind listening. And despite his habits of dominating conversations and constantly expressing ironically inflated opinions of himself, Grantaire was actually friendly, good-natured, and generous, and pretty easy to get along with.

He was also a decent mechanic. Feuilly had been worried, at first, seeing Grantaire's mutilated hands--so many scars and stumps it was surprising he was still able to handle tools--but it turned out all those accidents had been when he'd been working drunk or crushingly hungover. Which was a thing that still happened, it turned out, but with much less frequency than in the past.

He was working on it, Grantaire explained, the day after he turned up at work stumbling and swaying and spent the morning sleeping it off under the bench while Feuilly covered for him. It used to be a major problem (it turned out there had been a time when Grantaire had been transfered around as often as Feuilly in his first weeks in Mechanical), but things were better. And they would continue to get better, he promised, fidding with his keys with his ruined fingers; his voice was quiet, without the devil-may-care confidence that usually filled everything he said.

Feuilly accepted the apology and promised he wasn't going to put in a complaint about Grantaire. Grantaire looked relived (which seemed unnecessary, since a bonded worker like Feuilly couldn't really afford to stick his neck out by putting in complaints about other employees), and stayed sober for nearly three weeks. Feuilly didn't really mind--he'd much rather have to work alone once or twice a month than work every day with someone unpleasant. Besides, it meant that when Grantaire finally figured out that Feuilly couldn't read, he sort of had to take it in stride, didn't he?

Grantaire got along with the other Friends of BCA, too--which was a bit of a surprise to Feuilly, since Grantaire didn't appear to actually care about any of the causes that were important to the group. He'd refused to discuss the self-administration question with Feuilly--or rather, he'd been happy to talk about it, but he'd refused to be serious: The coversation had quickly spiralled off into a long, incomprehensible rant about the inherent corruption of all human systems, the illusion of progress, the futility of both large- and small-scale change, and how much better off humans were "when we all ran around naked picking fleas off each other--the Golden Age of humanity!" When Courfeyrac had invited Grantaire on one of the regular relief trips to the poorer districts of St. Denis, Grantaire had actually laughed out loud.

But he seemed happy enough to tag along when the group met at the cafeteria. They didn't have a lot of actual "business" to discuss at these meetings; there wasn't really anything to do until the answer to the self-administration proposal came back from Terra. But it was fun. Feuilly didn't have any money to spend outside the TEC cafeterias, but it was good to just spend time with his friends, without the weight of a crisis hanging over their heads. Grantaire seemed to enjoy the meetings, too, even though he scoffed and muttered things into his coffee any time Enjolras brought up any real discussion topics.

And the others seemed to like having him there. Joly and Bossuet, in particular, seemed to click with Grantaire; within two weeks, the three of them had developed a seamless three-part patter of puns and inside jokes, and in a month they were involved in an elaborate prank war against Bahorel and Jehan and Musichetta. (Their opponents loftily declared it wasn't a prank war at all, but a kind of performance art piece. Enjolras had listened to the explanation twice and just looked more bewildered every time; Feuilly just shook his head and accepted it.)

It made a nice change, Feuilly thought sometimes, remembering the first few meetings they'd had at those tables (Bossuet missing, Joly sitting there white-faced and sick-looking); now when he looked over to their table, Joly was always doubled over giggling at something Grantaire had said, clutching helplessly at Bossuet's arm. Soon the answer from Terra would come back, and things would be complicated and busy again--but for now, everything was quiet, and it was good.

Good never lasted.

  
  


* * *

  
  


What Feuilly and Lark had had on Gideon--their careful, quiet little lives on the margins of the colony, surviving by staying unnoticed as much as possible--couldn't have been called good. But even it couldn't last forever.

The months passed. Ships came and went, and the Thenardiers bought less and less food every time. Mr. Thenardier's demeanor became more bent and flattering with the other traders and more prickly whenever there was no one special in port. Mrs. Thenardier stopped taking walks in her fancy clothes, spending more and more time shut up inside her ship. The little pink-trimmed oxygen masks disappeared, and Eponine and Azelma spent a few days leaning wearily against the side of their ship, watching the children of Gideon running around the port.

Then the day came when a ship arrived with the part they needed--and there wasn't enough money left to buy it. There was a huge amount of yelling from the ship that evening, and then Lark came running out through the port and into the dark hallways beyond, to hide in the darkest corner of one of the abandoned storerooms. The next day, she worked twice as hard at the mining center, filling her bucket until she couldn't lift it at all and had to drag it along the uneven ground behind her, banging into her ankles at every step, until at the end of the day they were a mess of bruises.

Feuilly tried to help Lark out as much as he could, going hungry a few nights a week so he could give her his protein cakes; the lightheadedness the next day was a small price to pay for her tired, relieved smile. And they continued to prop each other up in other ways, too: the smile first thing in the morning, a stupid joke when the rocks were so heavy that they just wanted to cry, a few precious moments to play in the empty storage rooms between work and the end of the day. Despite everything, they still had each other, and that much at least was good.

But it was becoming more and more obvious that their time was running out. Feuilly never said anything about it--not to Lark, not even to himself--but somewhere deep inside, he began getting ready, steeling himself for the day when the next slip ship would dock at Gideon Station.

  
  


When it finally happened, it was worse than he'd expected. Because the ship that took Lark away wasn't a slip ship at all, but a tiny private shuttle, owned by a man who wouldn't give his name or say where he was going. And he paid the Thenardiers five times what a slip ship would've given them for Lark.

Everything happened very quickly. One day, Lark was working alongside him in the mining center, like always; the next day she didn't show up, and when he went out to get a drink of water at the midday break, she was waiting for him, twisting her hands together inside the floppy sleeves of her jumpsuit. She didn't have to say anything: As soon as he saw her face, he knew.

Feuilly had twenty minutes before he had to be back to work, and three of them ticked away as Lark pulled him down the corridors to one of the abandoned storerooms, the one with the empty oil drums that a younger Feuilly and Lark--happier, less frightened children who seemed like strangers now--had used to build a little playhouse. She didn't speak until they'd crawled inside the hut (somehow, even on their meager rations, they'd grown enough in the past two years that they had to hunch down to sit inside it). Then, slowly, she told Feuilly about the man who'd docked at the station late the previous night, who'd said something to Mr. Thenardier to make him change at once from threatening to ingratiating and--more impressive--to cut off the haggling at once, who'd crouched down in front of Lark and explained that he was an old friend of her mother's and he had paid off her debt and he was going to take her away from this place.

Feuilly's hands trembled, and he couldn't think of anything to say. Lark went on, describing the man who'd bought her, cataloging everything she'd noticed about him in the few hours she'd spent observing. "He talks really quietly. His hands are big and they have a lot of scars. I think he's done a lot of hard work. His clothes look expensive. His hair is all white, but his face doesn't look old to match. Do rich people dye their hair white, do you think?"

"I don't know," Feuilly managed to say.

"He must be rich," Lark repeated, "his clothes are really thick and warm. And he has his own ship, all to himself--a good ship, too, a lot newer than Theirs--but he's not a trader. But his hands aren't rich people's hands, and that's weird."

"If he's rich, that's good," Feuilly offered. He didn't know if it was good or not; it was hard to see how anything could be good when this was happening. Maybe the man being rich was actually a bad thing--if you were rich, nobody would arrest you, no matter what you did to the child you'd bought. Swallowing past the tightness in his throat, he tried again. "If he's rich, you'll eat well, and maybe you'll get some nice things."

"There's a room in the ship for me," Lark said slowly. "He took me onto the ship this morning to show me it. A little bunk with two blankets and a pillow, and there's a mirror on the wall, and a place to put clothes. He had it set up already."

Feuilly couldn't stop the shudder that ran through him at the thought of how the man had planned everything out, how he'd thought about buying a little girl so long in advance. It somehow made the whole thing worse.

Lark put a cold little hand on his shoulder. "Don't be sad, Feuilly," she said. He looked up at her then, trying to hide his worry in a smile--but the tears swimming in his eyes gave him away, and she patted his arm. "I think . . . I think it might be okay? He seems . . . gentle, at least. I don't think he'll hurt me, when--."

"I--I don't want him to take you away!" The sob that Feuilly was holding back burst out in spite of him, and he scrubbed miserably at his eyes. Then Lark was crying, too, and they clung to each other in the little house they'd played in, neither of them able to form words, crying and trying to comfort each other at the same time.

Far down the hallway, the bell sounded, calling the workers back to the mining center.

"You have to go," Lark choked out. "They'll close the doors and you'll miss the whole afternoon."

"I don't care."

"I'm leaving soon anyway, we're going at noon. You can't miss half a day of work for just a few more minutes." She pushed him out of the house, then followed after. As she crawled out, her foot pushed one of the oil drums over, and the whole side of the house tumbled down.

They ran back through the corridors together, Lark's hand gripping Feuilly's tight. When they reached the mining center, Feuilly's steps slowed, and as the boss yelled for him to hurry his ass up, Lark had to push him toward the big double doors. But it was Lark who held tight to the last second, until Feuilly thought she wasn't going to let go of his hand at all.

When he got out of work that evening, Lark was gone. He'd never even seen the man who took her.

  
  


For the next few weeks, the Thenardiers were like different people altogether. Mr. Thenardier bought a whole case of protein cakes off the next trader to stop by, offering them for sale to the residents of Gideon a week later at twice the regular price. Mrs. Thenardier took up walking around the station again, her fancy clothes replaced by plain pullovers and pants, but the snide judgement of everything around her back in her eyes.

And Eponine tried to become friends with Feuilly.

It took him a while to realize what she was doing; he was working twice as hard as ever in the mining center, and it still wasn't stopping him from worrying about Lark, imagining what was might be happening to her. But eventually, through the haze of exhaustion and anxiety, he realized that the way Eponine was always lingering around the mining center doors when they opened, the hesitant greeting, the way she kept looking up at him when she and Azelma were playing . . . they were offers of friendship.

He wasn't sure how to react. Part of him was achingly alone, raw from Lark's sudden departure and desperate to fill that hole with someone. But this was the girl who had sat by while her parents hit Lark and yelled at her and half-starved her; this was the girl who had skipped around the port in an oxygen mask while Lark had carried crates of shoes on and off the ship. Lonely as he was, he wasn't sure he wanted to be friends with Eponine.

More importantly, she wouldn't be here long either. Her parents had got their money, and as long as they didn't spend it all first, they'd get their missing engine part from the next mechanic who came by and be away from this empty little moon the second it was installed. Was there any point to becoming friends with her, when she too was going to leave before long, putting him right back where he'd started? (Was there any point to becoming friends with anybody?)

So Feuilly ignored Eponine, refusing any of her overtures of friendship--even the quarter of a protein cake she offered him, in her most blatant and desperate attempt--and waited for her to give up on him. Now that he was aware of what she wanted, he could see her disappointment every time he turned away from her. Part of him felt guilty about it. But a much larger part of him was too bitter about everything that had already happened--and too tired and hurt to be able to watch someone else he cared about leave him.

As if to prove his instincts right, a mechanic's ship arrived just four weeks after Lark had gone. The Thenardiers got their ship fixed and disappeared, leaving behind only a few scraps of trash around the space in the port where their ship had sat for the last year and a half.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The announcement that Beta Caeli A's petition for self-administered status had been granted came in on the first really hot day of the summer. The news was announced over the TEC loudspeakers around midmorning--the copper deposits had been confirmed, the planet had been upgraded to "Habitable--Class VR," and the people of Beta Caeli A would be administering the development of their own natural resource assets--and all work was forgotten as everyone in the truck hanger where Feuilly was working started talking about it. A good part of the excitement, Feuilly thought as he wiped the sweat from his forehead, was over the fact that the _location_ of the copper deposits had been included in the announcement--and that it was several hundred kilometers to the south, where the weather was much more temperate.

"We're heading out tomorrow morning," one of the drivers said decisively. "We've been getting everything ready, so we could just pick up and go, as soon as they put out the announcement. Between me and my husband and our in-laws, we can drive straight through and get there in a few days."

"Do you know how _far_ Bashang Station is?" someone else asked her. "Getting there is going to cost thousands of credits, just in the fuel. Why not wait until they start running buses?"

She shook her head stubbornly. "By that time the whole area will be swarming with people. We've been saving--we want to be some of the first people there, so we'll get there while there's still something to get."

"I'm waiting until next payday," another driver said. "There's no point going down there without the right gear. Besides--the next payday is the day before the next month's rent is due, so . . ."

What would the city look like in a month's time? Feuilly imagined the streets silent, the prefab buildings sitting empty under the baking sun, the big mining buildings slowly rusting away. Then he realized that no, life in St. Denis would probably go on pretty much how it was now--because the announcement had also included the information that TEC was planning to keep its bonded workers in St. Denis. That was nearly half the city; between that and the government presence in the capital, things would probably stay much like normal.

Grantaire wriggled out from underneath the truck they'd been trying to repair. "Well. Nobody's going to come checking on people any time soon, so I'm going to give this piece of shit a minute to sit and think about what it's done." He wiped his greasy hands on his jumpsuit, with little effect. "I'm surprised," he added, as if it was just an afterthought to what he'd just been saying. "I thought for sure they'd pack up the whole company and be out there with everyone in two days flat."

Feuilly shrugged. To be honest, he was a little bit glad to be staying in one place--St. Dennis was just starting to feel like somewhere he lived, instead of a place he was visiting. "I guess the cost of transportation is so high that it's cheaper for them to just bring everything in new. There won't be any lack of people desperate enough to get here to sign anything."

"I guess. They're already making money here, why let go of a good thing? Especially when you can just add an even better thing on top of it." Grantaire still didn't sound convinced, though. "But the speed factor, I thought that'd be the main thing for them. Get in early and get the biggest piece of the pie, you know."

"What about you, are you pulling up overnight or taking it a little slower?" Feuilly asked.

"Nah, I'm not leaving," Grantaire said. "I've got people here. Besides, I don't trust this kind of thing."

Feuilly was surprised; he'd never heard Grantaire mention a spouse or parents or anything. But he didn't ask any more about it, because questions about someone's family always invited questions back--and not that he actively wanted _not_ to talk about it . . . but "They're all dead," tended to be a bit of a conversation killer.

Instead he asked, "This kind of . . . what?"

"Ehhhh . . ." Grantaire gestured vaguely. "This whole Get-Rich Success Scheme bullshit. That kind of thing never delivers, or it does for one person in ten thousand. And everyone else is just left there in the dirt, their uprooted lives shriveling up around them. That's not how you get happiness. Happiness is--"

"Go on," Feuilly prompted, when Grantaire didn't finish the sentence.

"Happiness is a very tenuous thing," Grantaire said finally. "There's not as much of it around as people think. So if you have a little bit, you should hold onto it instead of chasing more."

He laughed, suddenly and loudly. "It's an easy philosophy to live by if you're as goddamn lazy as I am. Probably harder for people who are compulsive workers always trying to make the world better."

"Feuilly--Feuilly-- _Feuilly_!" someone shouted from the other side of the hangar.

Grantaire grinned. "Speaking of people with more than their fair share of happiness," he muttered.

Courfeyrac came tearing around the corner and threw his arms around Feuilly's neck. "Did you hear?--Of course you heard, it was on the loudspeaker--but we won, Feuilly, we won! I can't believe it!"

Feuilly laughed, grabbing onto the truck to keep from being knocked over. "I know, me either."

"We did it, we actually _did it!_ Or okay, TEC did it, them and their corporate signature-harvesting and their billions of credits. But--" Courfeyrac's eyes got wider, as if the realization was just hitting him. "But the idea came from us. _We_ were the ones who first floated self-administration."

He ran a hand through his hair, leaving half of it standing on end. "This is something that's going to change the course of this planet's history . . . and we played a role in it. Wow."

"Do you need to sit down?" Grantaire asked, jokingly. Courfeyrac slid down the side of the truck to sit beside him anyway.

"It seems real for the first time," Feuilly said. "I mean, I suppose we knew it was pretty likely when TEC stepped in. But I guess it didn't really register until now."

"This is going to be so amazing," Courfeyrac breathed. "To get to watch everything come into being here, to see how it all turns out. Maybe--maybe to get to influence things again?"

"It'll be so interesting," Feuilly agreed. Grantaire's wry smile showed how little he believed in anything they were saying--but he kept quiet.

"Anyway!" Courfeyrac said, jumping back to his feet. "Victory party tonight, yeah?"

" _That_ I can get behind," Grantaire laughed.

"Right after work, don't bother about dinner, I'm paying." Courfeyrac glanced over his shoulder. "I have to go--technically I'm on a rigging at the top of warehouse B-14, changing bulbs--but I just had to come see you! See you tonight?"

"We'll be there," Feuilly promised.

  
  


The celebration that evening was a bit uneven. While many of the group members were thrilled over the news, laughing and talking excitedly, doing their part to empty the bottle of disgustingly strong alcohol Grantaire had brought to contribute to the festivities, a few weren't really in a celebratory mood. Jehan was participating good-naturedly, but he'd been saying all along that TEC's easy success was a painful contrast to how little the Friends of BCA had accomplished on their own, and tonight he couldn't hide his discouragement. Marius and Ep both seemed upset--or shaken, maybe--over something that had happened earlier that day, but they just sat quietly on the edge of the festivities, nursing the hot drinks Courfeyrac had bought them and saying nothing about whatever it was. And Enjolras, Feuilly could tell, was impatient with the whole thing, wanting nothing more than to dive into the exciting work of discussing the formulation of the new administrative system, and how it could be influenced for the better. The others, though--especially Joly and Bossuet and Grantaire, who provided enough cheerfulness for six people--made up for the more sober members of the group.

It was hard for Feuilly to tear himself away when it started getting late, but the next day was a work day, and a bonded worker couldn't get away with slinking in twenty minutes late. Enjolras and Courfeyrac offered to walk out with him, since their routes home lay together for several blocks, and they strolled through the darkness of the city quietly for a few minutes. The air wasn't cool, not this deep into summer, but there was a breeze, and it was actually pleasant to be outdoors.

Feuilly tipped his head back and looked up at the night sky; the street lights washed out all but the brightest stars, but there was a scatter of brighter objects overhead--some disks and some oblongs, most a pale silver--that were Beta Caeli A's moons, and possibly a few of the nearer asteroids in the system. One of those disks was Gideon; someone had pointed it out once to Feuilly, but he didn't know how to find it again. He wasn't sure if it made it feel more or less far away, knowing that, in one of these little bright spots, he was looking right at the place where he'd spent the first nineteen years of his life.

"How soon do you think they'll start putting the administrative board together?" Courfeyrac asked quietly, and the sleepiness fell from Enjolras's face.

"It'll have to be right away," Enjolras said. "I'm thinking about skipping work tomorrow--I'm in the red on attendance, but with so many people leaving the city for Bashang Station, there's probably going to be a labor shortage, especially for the skilled trades. So even if they fire me, I'm sure I could find something else before long. It'll be worth it, anyway, to be there when things start, to observe the process directly and maybe even have a hand in it."

"Are you going to try to be on the administrative board?" asked Feuilly.

Enjolras shook his head. "I'm sure it'll all be older people, probably business owners and factory heads. But there's going to need additional staff, people to do the direct work of organizing and setting up and communicating with the population of the planet, and I can at least do those things. I just want to be involved--in whatever way I can."

"I can't wait to see what it looks like," Courfeyrac agreed. "I hope it really is as good as it sounds, and ordinary people actually get to be involved. But it's not that easy, is it? Especially when the system is starting from nothing."

"Even if it isn't perfect, even if the board is all people who are already rich and powerful, it'll still be people who really live on this planet making decisions for the planet," Feuilly said. "Just that is progress."

"And it'll be better than the Colonial Authority running the colony, basing everything on what's good for Terra," Enjolras said. "I've been working my way through some of the articles Jehan downloaded--did I tell you what I read about what I heard about the Alpha Centauri planets?"

They had just reached the corner where Feuilly's route split off from Enjolras and Courfeyrac's, but as Enjolras told them about the abuses on the Class-VR planets in the other system, they lingered there. The conversation wound on and on, through the experiences of other Class-VR planets to speculations about the changes the increased revenue might bring about in St. Denis, to dreams about a real educational system for Beta Caeli A. By the time Feuilly finally said goodnight to Enjolras and Courfeyrac, more than an hour had somehow flown by.

As he made his way carefully down the street--as you turned south, the lights got fewer and the roads worse, with more potholes--Feuilly heard familiar voices coming up behind him. He turned back to look and saw three or four people moving unsteadily down the road, leaning on each other. It was too dark to see their faces clearly, but Joly's laugh was unmistakable, and the light from the occasional streetlight glinted off Bossuet's shaved head as they made their way past. So much for getting home early, Feuilly thought--because if those two had left the party, it was well and truly over. He stepped to the side of the street to wait for them.

Joly and Bossuet and a third, still more intoxicated, person who hung draped between them--Grantaire--had made it to the nearest streetlight, and Feuilly was just about to greet them, when he heard Grantaire ask, "What's Feuilly's deal?"

Feuilly closed his mouth as Grantaire went on, his voice loud in drunken incaution. "I mean, Feuilly's great, I love Feuilly . . . but how do you unlock him?"

"What do you mean?" Joly giggled.

"Like, how do you get him to be friends with you? Is there a magical quest you have to perform, or, or, I don't know, is he password-protected or something? I've worked with the guy for weeks, and he's just as formal as he was when I started, and he's talked about himself, what, twice? What's the secret?"

"Ummm," Bossuet drawled, the alcohol slowing his tongue, "I think it just takes him a long time to get comfortable with people."

"But he doesn't dislike you," Joly added. "I promise, he likes you just fine."

"He doesn't seem uncomfortable, though," Grantaire protested. "I know lots of people who are awkward with new people because they're just uncomfortable or whatever, and Feuilly's not like that. Okay, maybe he was at first? But only for a few days, and then he seemed normal and comfortable. But I still get the feeling that he doesn't--I don't know, not that he doesn't _care_ about me, that sounds really petty--but that he doesn't . . . believe in our friendship?"

"I really think it is that he takes a _long_ time to really become friends with people," Joly said, a little more seriously. "I felt the same way when I first met him, like it was almost a year before he seemed to really consider me a friend."

"But it's like he . . . doesn't expect it from anyone else, either," Bossuet said. "He always seems surprised when anyone invites him to do anything with them."

"Does he just not want friends?" Grantaire stumbled over nothing in the street, clutched at Joly to save himself from falling, and stopped to recover his equilibrium. The trio was a few paces past Feuilly now, none of them having noticed him standing quietly in the shadows. "Some people are fine going it on their own, without friends or lovers or anything, or at least they think they are; it doesn't compute to me, but since when has my brain been a measure of normalcy? So is that what's going on with our friend--or acquaintance, if he'd prefer that--is he just the kind of person who doesn't need other people?"

"I don't think it's that." Bossuet pulled Grantaire's arm back over his shoulders. "It kind of seems like he wants friends, but maybe . . . doesn't believe in them? Not that he doesn't trust people, he has so much faith in people--but it's friend _ship_ itself he doesn't trust." He ran a hand over his head. "I don't know, does that sound silly? I'm kind of drunk."

"I'm at least twice as drunk as you," Grantaire pointed out. "So I don't know that I'm qualified to--when even on my best day, that is, my least drunk day, although from another perspective those would be my worst days, I'm hardly a model of--of--unless--to--"

"You really are drunk," Joly giggled, as Grantaire's speech disintegrated into disjointed prepositions. "Come on, let's keep walking; I need to go to bed."

Feuilly waited until they were out of sight before starting to walk again. He wasn't sure himself why he was avoiding them. It was awkward, perhaps, that they'd been talking about him--but it wasn't like they'd been spreading cruel rumors. In fact, he supposed, they were right--he _was_ slow to consider people his friends. And it had nothing to do with the people themselves; Grantaire was generally a pretty decent person, and Feuilly enjoyed being around him.

Becoming friends with him just seemed like more trouble than it was worth, when either he or Feuilly would inevitably be moving on in a year or two. Grantaire hadn't made plans to leave, of course, and Feuilly wasn't going anywhere himself--at least as long as TEC held to their plan of keeping their bonded workers in St. Denis. But Feuilly knew it would happen, sooner or later.

He'd seen enough of life to recognize the pattern. You knew someone, you grew close to them, then in one year, or two years, or nine, they went away or someone took them away or they died. And you were left with a big empty space inside you, limping along because you'd learned to walk leaning on them. You recovered, of course. You learned how to walk on your own again, or you found a new person to lean on, and things were good again. But it was only a matter of time until the next person left.

And after a while, you got tired of the whiplash.

As he reached the bonded worker district and the prefab buildings around him grew more and more run-down, Feuilly tried to shake off his thoughts and appear alert. (Not that he had anything of value on him, but that wouldn't stop a desperate person from hoping.) But he couldn't stop thinking about what Bossuet and other two had said about him.

Perhaps he shouldn't be bothered by it--after all, what they'd said about him was true. It was the _way_ they'd said it, as if they were sorry for him, that made Feuilly twitchy and uncomfortable. It seemed unfair.

After all, he was just being reasonable. Given what he could expect from life, it seemed like he was making the wiser choice; Grantaire and Courfeyrac and all the other people who flung themselves headlong into relationships with people they would lose before long were the ones to be pitied--not Feuilly. Maybe it _was_ sad, knowing that everyone would eventually leave you, knowing that the only person you could depend on to be there for you forever was yourself. But that didn't make it any less true.


	5. Chapter 5

The morning after the announcement that the application had been approved, the new posters appeared.

Not in the bonded worker areas--the streets around Feuilly's housing and the cafeteria where he ate still proclaimed that TEC supported an independent Beta Caeli A. But around and inside the main TEC buildings, especially the ones where skilled laborers worked, a new series of posters had been hung overnight.

They showed rugged, solidly built people striding over rocky landscapes or standing on mountains with sunlight streaming up behind them. They carried mining tools and backpacks and oxygen masks, and wore sturdy, warm clothing in bright shades of orange and blue and yellow. Some of the posters had families--couples with hands clasped, eager children standing firmly by their sides--and others showed a single man or woman staring dramatically into the future. Most of the posters had two lines of writing: a longer line that varied and a short line across the bottom that was always the same.

Grantaire appeared at Feuilly's elbow as he stood staring up at the one outside the HVAC workshop, trying to puzzle out the text.

"The bell's going to ring any minute now," he reminded Feuilly quietly.

Feuilly started and glanced up at the clock. "Oh, right." He hesitated before the poster.

"'Play your part in exploring Beta Caeli A's new frontier,'" Grantaire read for him. "'Apply for your development permit today.'"

"That's what I thought it said," Feuilly said. "The part about the permit, at least. But what does that mean, 'development permit'?" Reluctantly, he turned away from the poster and hurried into the workshop, swiping his badge over the sensor just seconds before the bell sounded. "It has to be something to do with the copper, but I don't know what it means. What do you need a permit to do? Who do you apply to? We just found out we got approved for self-administered status yesterday; there can't possibly be an administrative system set up yet."

"More to the point," Grantaire asked as he swiped his own badge, "why are all the posters from TEC?"

Feuilly frowned. "You're right. That's--I don't like it."

He shook his head. He didn't like the explanation that was forming itself in his mind--it was a world he didn't want to believe in--but he couldn't find any way to disprove it. "It must be . . ." He trailed off, unable to come up with another explanation. "It can't be that."

"In my experience," Grantaire said heavily, "it usually is." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "I'm sure there'll be another meeting tonight to sort everything out."

 

Grantaire was right, although by the time the work day was over and the Friends of BCA had collected themselves at the cafeteria, what had happened was obvious, the evidence piled onto them all day in radio announcements and flyers and a sign that had gone up over one of the TEC offices downtown, proclaiming it the "Development Administration Office."

Enjolras said it anyway. "It appears that TEC has taken control of the administration of Beta Caeli A."

"And controlling the administration effectively means they control the copper," Musichetta said. "I asked around at work, found my district's administrative board representative--which for the Keyhole district happens to be somebody from the Human Capital division. It turns out you need a permit not just for setting up an independent mining operations, but to do just about _anything_ in Bashang Station. There's different specific permits for different kinds of businesses--selling food, practicing medicine, what have you--and others required just for general economic activity. They can't actually prohibit you from traveling there, but they set it up as a special economic zone where it's illegal to spend or receive money without a development administration permit--which comes to the same thing."

"So you can go to Bashang Station," Bahorel said, "but you can't do anything once you get there--mining or repair work or selling supplies to miners."

"Or buying a protein cake. Even personal transations are illegal."

Bossuet shook his head. "That's going to be a nasty surprise for all the people who left the city last night," he said. "Imagine traveling for a week just to get there and find you have to turn around."

"They'll probably be releasing permits there too," Ep pointed out. "With a higher application fee, and folks will have no choice but to pay it. It's a perfect racket." She chewed on her lip, considering. "Only they should've waited another day, given more people the chance to move out there."

"Not everyone is going to have the money for the permit," Feuilly said. "I know people who've sunk their entire savings into paying just for the trip and a few bits of machinery to start up mining. What are they going to do? They won't even have the fuel to go back."

"Perfect: more bonded labor for TEC's new expansion," Ep answered immediately. "It's really smart, actually." She spread her hands. "Look, I'm not saying it's right, but it _is_ smart. They know what they're doing, these guys."

"I don't think very many people will actually end up getting the permit." Jehan motioned to a stack of documents that he had been poring over. "This is the application. It's . . . very complex. The language is difficult--and even if you can read all the words, that doesn't mean it makes sense. I don't think many people will be able to apply."

"So basically, the only mining operation able to set up out there is going to be TEC," Courfeyrac concluded. "Is there any word yet on whether they're transfering regular employees or just using bonded labor?"

"Does it matter?" Musichetta asked. "It's still going to be TEC taking in all the extra revenue from the copper. No way an ordinary mining worker is going to get paid any more in Bashang Station than here--or if they are, the cost of food and clothes and shelter out there is going to eat it all up. Hell, they might make _less_ there."

"So TEC not only gets the power to control the planet's new phase of development," Enjolras said, "but they're going to make sure they're the only ones who profit from the resources."

"I thought self-administration was more to do with managing developers from outside the planet and regulating trade with the rest of the system," Courfeyrac protested. "Not controling who on the planet had access to the resources. Can they really do this?"

"In all the information we could find when we looked into it before, the description and actual powers of the administrative board were left very open-ended. We were excited about it at the time--we didn't think through all the possibilities." Jehan sighed. "My guess is it probably is legal."

"That doesn't make it fair," Enjolras said. He stood up suddenly. "Marius, how late are the Colonial Authority offices open?"

Marius squinted into middle space, tracing days on an invisible schedule with his finger. "Um . . . probably until eight, tonight. There's a moon interference window that's open from three to seven, so there'll be some people in the offices sending large data packages, and there might be some remote meetings going on. But they won't--it's not like they're open to the public."

"That doesn't matter," Enjolras said grimly.

"What are you going to do?" Marius asked.

"They gave our planet away to TEC. The least they can do is listen to the people they're screwing over."

"I'll come with you," Courfeyrac volunteered.

"I will too," Ep said, to Feuilly's surprise.

"Should we all come?" Bossuet asked. "Or is too many likely to get us kicked out?"

"How about if five of us go?" Courfeyrac said, after a moment of thought. "Five unassuming, friendly-looking people--enough to indicate this is a collective complaint, one they need to take seriously. But we should look unintimidating enough that they still let us in to talk to people."

"Well, then count me out," Bahorel laughed.

"I'm small and harmless-looking," Joly volunteered. "I'll put them off their guard--and then Ep can swoop in for the kill."

After some discussion, Marius was rejected by virtue of needing to stay on the Colonial Administration's good side, and Feuilly agreed to be the fifth member of the group, mostly because he was the smallest person in the Friends of BCA. And so they set off toward the main office. Enjolras, seething with impatience and frustration, kept surging several paces ahead and having to stop at each corner to wait for the others to catch up. Privately, Feuilly thought that if the goal was not to appear too threatening, perhaps Enjolras should have been replaced with Jehan, who despite his height moved slowly and had a disarmingly gentle smile.

But to his surprise, the minute they passed through the Colonial Authority's office's doors, Enjolras's face softened and the tension in his body retreated to a barely noticeable tightness in his shoulders. He glanced around the office, then approached the front desk, smiling charmingly at the receptionist.

"Hello, we're here to talk to someone about the administration of the copper development," he said.

The receptionist barely looked up from his computer screen. "Wrong office, you want TEC for that," he said.

"No, actually we want the Colonial Authority," Enjolras said with a quiet smile that almost masked the stone-cold firmness in his voice. "As citizens of this planet, we're concerned that the Colonial Authority is not fulfilling its duty to protect our rights, and we'd like to talk to someone about that. Under Terran law we have the right to make grievances heard to the authority."

"You can't just come in and demand to talk to someone," the receptionist sighed. "You can attend the next public forum, if--"

"Which is not for another three weeks, at which point the develpment administration will be firmly established and it will be too late to do anything about it," Enjolras said. "No, we'd like to speak to someone tonight."

"Everyone's in meetings, you can't--"

"Our rights are being stripped away by a corporation whose sole motive is its own profit, our planet's major natural resource is falling under a monopoly and all the economic benefits are going to go to this giant corporation, and the one process that seemed designed to protect our rights and our _voice_ in this matter has been twisted around and used to stab us in the back--and you expect us to just shut up and away and wait quietly for the next _useless_ public forum?"

The receptionist finally looked up as Enjolras leaned closer to him, his voice rising. "We're not going to sit back and let TEC trample all over our lives, and we're not going to give up until the Colonial Authority steps up and does its _job,_ which is to act as an _authority_ on this planet and protect people from corporations like TEC!"

"Look, I don't make any of these decisions," the receptionist said raising his hands defensively. "I just work the front desk, okay? I'm not in charge of anything."

"We understand completely," Enjolras said, flipping back to his quiet voice and charming smile with a scary abruptness. "Which is why I think you should send us up to talk to somebody who _is_ involved in these decisions. Because we'd really rather talk to the people we _are_ angry at, then take it out on an innocent front desk worker."

The receptionist opened his mouth to object again, then sighed. "Fine, here--go up to the third floor, office number 328. That's Madeline Nyangos, one of the legal representatives. She's about to go home, though, so you only have about ten minutes."

Madeline Nyangos was in fact just locking the door of room 328 behind her by the time they reached the third floor, but Enjolras strode forward anyway.

"Good evening," he said. "We're here to talk about the self-administration process."

She frowned. "Who let you up here?"

Enjolras ignored the question. "We want to know why the Beta Caeli System Transport and Excavation Corporation has apparently been put in control of the development of the copper deposits in Bashang Station, when this process should be under the control of the people of Beta Caeli A."

"We petitioned for self-administration," Joly added, "not administration by a giant multi-planetary mining corporation."

"You petitioned for administration by TEC," Nyangos told them.

"We _what_?" Courfeyrac burst out.

Nyangos sighed. "It was in the self-administration application," she said. "When a planet applies for self-administration, they can opt to create a new administrative board, or they can designate a preexisting group or corporation as their administrating organization. The application for Beta Caeli A was submitted with the Transport and Excavation Corporation as the designated organization."

"But--" Courfeyrac sputtered. "We didn't know--nobody--"

"They might not have been very vocal about it, but it was in there in all the application paperwork," Nyangos told him coolly, and Feuilly remembered the complicated document his boss had brought around, the way everyone in the shop had just signed it without thinking to question what it said. "It would never have been accepted, otherwise."

"What do you mean?" Enjolras asked.

"Beta Caeli A is a mining colony," Nyangos said. "Ninety percent of the population works in the mines, and the remaining ten percent is made up of mechanics and suppliers of basic human services--food and sanitation services and the like. There's no education to speak of, no intellectual class, no awareness of system-wide conditions and events."

"That doesn't mean we don't have the right to--" Enjolras began, but she cut him off.

"It means the planet doesn't have the _capability_ of self-administration." As Enjolras gaped at her in indignation, she continued. "BCA is a planet of industrial workers and low-level trades. Three-quarters of the planet is illiterate, and those that can read only do so for the purposes of their jobs. Just look at the petition--six thousand signatures, and to all apearances not a single person read it closely enough to realize that it designated TEC as the administrating organization. Nobody here has the knowledge or skill to handle this kind of responsibility. And frankly, any application for self-administration status that included the formulation of a new administrative board from among the planet's population wouldn't even have been passed along to Terra--except as a joke. Like it or not, TEC is only the reason the self-administration was approved at all."

"But that's--"

"This conversation is finished," Nyangos said firmly. "I'll let you walk yourselves out." She marched past Enjolras and down the stairs, leaving the five of them alone in the empty hallway.

Enjolras gaped after her, his face red. He looked like he was about to either start kicking things or burst into tears. Far down the hallway, another Colonial Authority official locked his office door and headed for the opposite stairwell without a glance at the people standing in front of Nyangos's door.

"Let's go, Enjolras," Courfeyrac murmured, plucking at his elbow. "There's no point in staying here."

They made their way downstairs quietly and, heads ducked, filed past the receptionist at the front desk. The man didn't even glance up--which Feuilly had thankful for; Ep looked ready to fight _someone_ and if the man had said anything, or even smiled, it might have been all the reason she needed. But he kept his eyes glued to his screen, and they made it outside without incident.

They sat on the steps in front of a nearby shop that was closed for the night--all except Ep, who paced back and forth in the street before them.

"They knew the whole time," she muttered. "While we were sitting around waiting to hear about the application, the bastards were getting ready--putting together forms and office space and fucking _posters_. And we had no idea."

Joly, his shoulders hunched, nodded miserably. "It seemed so . . . everything was going to be so good."

"It's not fair." Enjolras's voice was strangled, and he was shaking slightly. Feuilly was surprised at his fear, until he noticed the muscles jumping in his clenched jaw and realized that Enjolras wasn't afraid at all--he was angry. "They promised us . . . they promised freedom. TEC _used_ us to get more power. And the Colonial Authority doesn't give a damn."

"Okay, what's our next step?" Courfeyrac asked. "We probably can't do another radio broadcast, but there must be some good way to get the message out to people that TEC stabbed us in the back and we have to stab back at them--boycott the development, or file a thousand complaints with the Colonial Authority."

"Prove to them we _are_ capable of organized, effective political action," Joly agreed.

"How can we get the word out?" Feuilly asked. "Make our own posters?"

"Maybe we can post our information on top of the TEC posters," Ep suggested. "Even if TEC tears them down, enough people would see them first to start people talking. Or we could hold a public meeting--in the cafeteria, or maybe in a bigger space."

"Enjolras, what do you think?" Courfeyrac asked him, gently touching him on the shoulder.

Enjolras took a deep breath. "I think," he said carefully, looking down at his clenched fists, the knuckles white, "that all of this is really important and we definitely need to discuss it all soon. But right now . . . all I want to do is go down to the TEC headquarters and yell and scream at them until my voice is gone."

A bitter smile crossed Coufeyrac's face. "That's a plan I can get behind."

The new Development Administration Offices were housed in one of the many smaller TEC buildings scattered around the central part of the city--a prefab building in the TEC design, just like any of the hundred other office buildings the company owned. A printed sign had been fixed above the door declaring the building's new role, and a pair of the "Apply for your development permit today!" posters flanked the entrance. The windows were all dark.

Enjolras stopped on the opposite side of the street from the building. He squared his shoulders, drew in a deep breath, and then screamed at the darkened offices: "You _bastards!_ "

Behind Feuilly, Ep laughed, a little low sound of bitter satisfaction. Enjolras took a step forward and kept shouting. "You turned on us! You told us you were on our side, that you wanted freedom for the planet, that you were going to help us--but you were just in it for yourselves!"

The doors of the bar one building down and the all-hours clinic across the street were opening, and a cluster of curious people had appeared at the end of a residential alley a block or two down, everyone craning their necks to see what the trouble was. Enjolras didn't even seem to see them.

"You _used_ us!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "We worked with you, and you used us for your own profit. You tricked us into signing away our own freedom just so you can suck even more money away from the people of this planet. You can't take away our voices like that; it's not right! It's not _fair_!"

A man edged over from the crowd forming in front of the bar. "Hey, is he okay?"

"Everything's fine," Courfeyrac said quickly. "He's--we're just angry."

"There isn't anybody in there, is there?" the man asked, his eyes narrowing as he looked across the street at the dark windows of the office building.

Enjolras was breathing hard. "It doesn't matter," he spat out. "They wouldn't listen anyway. They think we're all ignorant, incapable of making our own decisions, not worthy to even have our opinions heard. That's why they're making us all their slaves, managing all our lives for us."

A medic from the clinic laughed. "They're what now? Last I checked, it's still a free planet, for anyone who's not stupid enough to get themselves bonded."

Enjolras's eyes widened, and Courfeyrac opened his mouth to retort, but Feuilly jumped in. "The new development administration is just bonded labor dressed up in fancy clothes. It wasn't enough for TEC to own half the people on the planet, they want everyone else under their control as well."

The man shook his head, skeptical. "It's still a free planet," he repeated.

"Is it, though?" Feuilly asked. "It seems to me, on a free planet, anyone who wanted to would be able to get in on the copper. If you have to get a permit from TEC just to set up a mining operation in Bashang Station, if you need their permission to sell supplies to miners or even just to buy a handful of vitamins out there--tell me, how is that freedom?"

"And it gets worse," Enjolras said, "because there's no way most of the people on this planet will be able to get permits at all. There's an application fee that many people won't be able to afford, and the paperwork for the application is a stack of documents this high." He held up his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart, and the people from the bar frowned. "Not every person on this planet can read, and even for those who can, it's a complicated document. I doubt more than a few hundred people will actually complete applications--which means that even if TEC approves every single one, they'll still have near total control over the Bashang Station area."

"That's not fair," one of Enjolras's listeners said. Others from the bar were nodding, moving in closer to hear the conversation.

"We can still go out there, of course," Enjolras said, "as regular workers--or as bonded laborers, if we can't afford to travel. But if you're making a regular wage, what difference does it make if you're mining copper or the slag-grade taconite that's mined here in St. Denis? And when your only options are the ones TEC _allows_ you to have, what difference does it make if you're a free laborer or a bonded slave?"

There was an angry murmur from the gathered people. Courfeyrac gently pinched Feuilly's arm, and Feuilly turned to see a sizeable group of people clustered behind them, with more drifting in from the nearby housing area. Courfeyrac met his eyes, smiling delightedly but with a hint of anxiety mixed in.

"When we signed that petition for self-administration," Enjolras said, "we were asking for the right to decide for ourselves--as a planet--how the development would go. We wanted to have a say in what happened to our own planet, to control which outsiders came in and what they were allowed to do here, to make sure that the profits from the copper stayed on Beta Caeli A and made it a better place to live, instead of being sucked out into corporate vaults on other planets.

"Instead, TEC jumped on board this process that was supposed to secure _our_ rights for us, and they _used_ it to get control of the entire copper deposit. They don't care about this planet; they don't care about freedom or just distribution of our resources. All they care about is their bottom line--and they're willing to trample over every one of us for it."

"The bastards!" someone behind Feuilly muttered.

Enjolras had been nearly shouting; now he lowered his voice suddenly, and the crowd drew in to hear what he was saying. "We just visited the Colonial Authority offices to complain about it, and do you know what they told us?" He paused, his mouth set in a grim line.

"They told us they granted TEC control over the development because the people of Beta Caeli A--the ordinary people, the people who actually _do_ the mining work and keep the machines running and keep repairing our generations-old buildings and keep each other alive with food and clothes and medical care--they think _we_ don't have what it takes to manage this planet. They think we're just a bunch of ignorant, worthless colonists who are too stupid to be trusted with the right to make decisions about their own lives. They think we're better off with a huge interplanetary corporation managing our lives, because we don't have the brains to do it ourselves. The Colonial Authority thinks we're nobody. TEC thinks we're nobody.

"But I disagree." Enjolras's eyes were fire and his hands were trembling with excitement and anger and Feuilly couldn't look away. "I believe in the people of Beta Caeli A, because I've seen what we're capable of. I've lived here all my life, and I've seen people face down mountains with nothing but a pickaxe and a shovel. I've seen doctors and mechanics tackle unsolvable problems with none of the supplies they should have had and information that's at least two decades out of date--and somehow, they find a way to solve them. I've seen neighborhoods organize together to distribute vitamins and air filters; I've seen strangers cooperate to shore up rusting housing units. We've always known that we had to take care of ourselves, because nobody else in the galaxy was going to look out for us--and through it all, we've learned strength and flexibility and the determination to face any problem life throws at us."

Enjolras's voice rang out in the darkening street, echoing back off the buildings, echoing back in the murmurs of the people listening. "I believe that the people of Beta Caeli A are strong, and intelligent, and brave--but more importantly, I believe that _none of that matters_ when it comes to the right to control your own future. Every human being has the right to make their own choices. We all have the right to be heard.

"And we can claim that right!" Enjolras waved a hand at the TEC offices across the street. "TEC thinks they can walk all over us, because we're worthless and powerless and we're never going to fight back. But this is our planet, and we _can_ take back the right to have a say in it. I believe in the people of this planet, and I'm ready to fight for us! I believe in Beta Caeli A--do you?"

"Yes!" Joly sang out. The word was echoed by a woman, farther back in the crowd, and then a few others.

"Do you believe in Beta Caeli A?" Enjolras shouted again, and this time the answer was a roar. Feuilly found himself shouting along with everyone, caught up in the noise and the excitement and the incredible, terrible hope that maybe something _good_ could happen here.

"Then let's go tell TEC," Enjolras urged. "Let's wake them up and let them know that we won't lie down and let them walk all over us. That we're not going to shut up until they give us back our planet!"

The main TEC offices were just two blocks over from the Development Administration Office building, and Enjolras and Joly led the way. As the crowd surged down the street toward it, Feuilly could see the top stories of the TEC building hunching over the city, the windows still lit up (Meetings with business partners on other planets? After-hours workers cleaning the offices of the department heads?). Ordinarily, it would be an ominous sight, like a smelting furnace looming high overhead. But surrounded by a crowd of angry people, with Enjolras striding along determinedly in front of him and Courfeyrac radiating excitement at his elbow . . . the offices looked almost distant. What could those cold lights in the darkness do to them? The real power was down here, in the street, marching forward in worn-out boots.

They drew up in front of the TEC corporate offices, seething along the opposite side of the street. Courfeyrac had taken over from Enjolras and was leading a chant; Feuilly's ears rang with cries of "I believe in BCA!"

The TEC building remained cold and brightly lit--and completely still and silent, without any signs of life.

The crowd was growing, getting angrier. People streamed in from all around, drawn in by the shouting, and staying to see what happened or even do a little yelling themselves. Joly clutched at Feuilly's arm as he was almost knocked off his feet. Somebody threw a rock, but without real commitment; it hit the ground a few feet from the building and sent up a little cloud of dust.

At first Feuilly thought the deep, steady rhythm was the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. But it kept getting louder, sharper, less organic. He craned his neck to see where it was coming from, trying to place the sound. He could see Ep and Enjolras looking around for it, too.

Just moments after Feuilly recognized the noise, the first security officers came around the corner of the TEC building.

These weren't the neighborhood police Feuilly was used to, the sleepy Colonial Authority patrols that would probably step in if an actual murder was happening but were mostly content to look the other way for anything less serious. These were faceless figures in helmets and black body armor and heavy boots whose rhythmic tread beat its way inside Feuilly's head. They carried clear shields and thick black sticks. And guns.

And behind the first rank of five came another--and another, and another. They kept coming around the corner, five by five, spreading out across the block, until the entire TEC building was shielded by a double row of black-clad figures. For a moment the crowd hushed as the guards shuffled themselves together, drawing up their ranks in preparation.

Then Courfeyrac shouted "Give us back our planet!" and the crowd's roar swelled even louder than before. The guards stood stock-still, as if they couldn't even hear the mob of angry people standing just yards away. (But nobody backed down, Feuilly noted with a swell of pride, even at this menacing display of indifference. Enjolras was right to believe in the people of Beta Caeli A.) For nearly a minute, the officers just stood there unmoving.

Then, at no signal Feuilly could see, one of them calmly raised a gun and fired at the protesters.


	6. Chapter 6

There was no bang when the gun went off, and for a single moment, Feuilly was able to convince himself it was all a bluff. The guards' guns weren't loaded--of course they weren't--TEC couldn't have its private security actually _shoot_ people. The protesters were just shouting, and maybe throwing a rock or two; they weren't breaking any laws, and certainly weren't doing anything that deserved a violent response. Who would order something so obviously out of proportion?

Then the old man standing next to Feuilly collapsed.

There was a horrified gasp, followed by angrier shouts, mixed in with screams from the people near the man. Half the people were trying to get away, the other half pushing forward.

"I'm a doctor," Joly was shouting. "I'm a doctor, let me _through!_ " Next to Feuilly, Ep shoved someone aside and Joly wriggled through the gap she'd made to drop to his knees beside the old man. He pressed his fingers against the man's neck, waited, readjusted. There was no blood that Feuilly could see, just a little black dart sticking from the man's shoulder, so tiny and harmless looking that it could have been an insect that had landed on him for a moment.

Feuilly, arms outstrectched in an attempt to hold back the people who were crowding around the old man, was just close enough to see the moment when something shattered in Joly's face. He looked up, his expression the stricken look of a child searching for someone to reassure them that the monster in their nightmares isn't real.

"He's already dead," he said, and it was almost a whisper.

"You _bastards_!" a woman shouted. "What did he do to deserve that?" She threw herself toward the guards--who were just standing there, watching, their faces invisible behind their visors--but around her, other protesters were trying to get away. Someone stumbled and went down under the others' feet.

Almost immediately, the protest became chaos. Everyone in the crowd seemed to be trying to move in a different direction, pushing each other frantically, falling over each other and pulling each other down. Feuilly saw Ep clinging to Joly's arm, trying to pull him away from the body of a woman who had fallen.

"We have to get out of here!" she was shouting. "Joly, come _on!_ "

Joly shook his head stubbornly, not even looking up as he lifted the woman's eyelids with one hand, the other pressing a wad of cloth to her forehead. Feuilly tried to get over to them to help carry the woman out of danger, but the crowd was pushing him in the opposite direction. His feet slipped on the uneven pavement and he clutched at someone's coat to avoid going down.

Then the security officers were there, shoving people with their shields, black clubs rising and falling, and Feuilly couldn't get away because there were people every direction he turned. A stick landed on his shoulder, making his whole arm go numb for a second.

Shouts and screams filled his ears; he was cut off from the sight of Joly and Ep; all around him were panicked strangers and helmeted guards. He heard something go past his ear with a high whine and turned to see a woman fall to the ground with a black dart in her neck.

A guard was pushing toward him, gun raised. For an instant, everything seemed to freeze--Feuilly staring down the black hole of the gun barrel; the thought, too fast for words, that he was going to be shot, gripping him; the orange light of a streetlight shifting on the guard's gloves as the finger tightened on the trigger--

Somebody grabbed Feuilly's arm and yanked hard. Off balance, Feuilly would have fallen to be trampled if the person hadn't still been holding onto him. He looked up into Courfeyrac's terrified eyes. Courfeyrac's mouth moved as he shouted something, but Feuilly couldn't hear it in the chaos.

He let Courfeyrac drag him to his feet and push him to the edge of the crowd. But when the people started to thin out, mostly running away in the same direction instead of pushing frantically every which way, Feuilly stopped, twisting around in Courfeyrac's grip.

"We can't--" he panted. "There are people who--they--"

"We can't go back." Courfeyrac's voice was high and shaky, but his grip on Feuilly's arm was iron. "What would we do? There's no fixing this."

Feuilly glanced over Courfeyrac's shoulder. The street in front of the TEC building was still a swarm of protestors and guards, but the edges of the fight were quickly unraveling as people ran or limped away.

"But--Enjolras. And--Joly, and Ep."

Courfeyrac looked back as well, but he shook his head. "We should get ourselves somewhere safe," he said. "That's what you'd want _them_ to do, right? Instead of going back to look for you?" Feuilly had to give in at that, and he let Courfeyrac pull him down the street again.

After a few minutes, as the sounds of screams faded behind them, Feuilly thought to look around at where they were. In the darkness, all the prefab buildings looked the same, and the few street signs he glimpsed were words he didn't know. "Where are we going?"

Courfeyrac's face was beaded with sweat. "I don't know. I just--" He stopped and looked around. "We're--um--north . . . northeast of TEC, I think. We should. Find somewhere safe. Or--or call." He patted down his pockets, and his face twisted like he was about to burst into tears. "My phone. It's not here."

Now that they were away from the fighting, Courfeyrac was shaking. Feuilly took his arm. "We'll go find everyone else. Who lives near here?"

"I don't know--I think--Musichetta." Courfeyrac nodded to himself. "Yes, Musichetta. She has an apartment in the Keyhole District, it's really quiet there. That'll be safe, right?"

"As safe as anywhere. Which way?"

"Um--we should turn left, and--I don't know how far north we are, exactly. But. It should be in this direction."

They walked a while longer, keeping to the shadows on the edges of the street. Courfeyrac jumped at tiny sounds--or at nothing--every time they passed a sidestreet, and Feuilly's hands were trembling as well. He couldn't stop seeing the old man just _drop_ to the ground right in front of him; his ears were echoing with the sound of clubs hitting flesh. He shivered, and Courfeyrac, beside him, made a wordless noise of agreement.

When they heard running feet somewhere in the darkness ahead of them, they almost tripped over each other in their hurry to pull each other into the narrow darkness between two buildings. They waited there as the footsteps grew closer and closer. Just as the sound came within a block or so, Feuilly realized how stupid they had been to trap themselves in the tight space, like they were just waiting for somebody to catch them and-- A cold sweat broke out over his skin, and his heartbeat was loud in his ears.

But the person jogged right by their hiding spot without so much as looking at them--and before Feuilly even had time to breathe again in relief, Courfeyrac was squeezing out beside him, shouting "Bahorel!"

Bahorel stumbled in surprise and whirled around, eyes wide. Then he broke into relieved, slightly manic laughter. "Oh thank God. What's going on? There's people running all over the city, but everybody has a different story. Jehan said he heard screaming down near the center city." Courfeyrac flung himself against Bahorel's broad chest, laughing unsteadily, and Bahorel hugged him tightly, throwing Feuilly a worried look. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"TEC's security are killing people," Courfeyrac said, his voice shaky. "We--I didn't think they would just--"

"We went down to the TEC headquarters," Feuilly explained. "Enjolras was talking to some people and . . . I don't know, everyone got really excited. We didn't plan it, it just happened. But we marched down to the TEC buildings to tell them what we thought of them backstabbing us." Bahorel nodded solemnly, but Feuilly could see a glint of jealousy in his eyes. "Then TEC sent out a ton of security guards, and the next thing we knew they were killing people--they had clubs and shields and guns--" Feuilly broke off, swallowing hard.

"We don't know where anyone else is," Courfeyrac added. "We got separated and we couldn't see them." He twisted out of Bahorel's arms. "We didn't--God, Feuilly, you were right, we should have gone back to try to help them, they could--"

"You did good getting yourselves out of there," Bahorel reassured him. He kept a hand on his shoulder, somewhere between offering comfort and making sure Courfeyrac didn't go running off. "And if you got out okay, they probably did, too."

"Probably?" Feuilly asked. "None of them called?"

Bahorel shook his head. "Not before I left. But Ep doesn't have a phone, you know, and we burned Enjolras's to do research. Come to think of it, I don't think you called, either."

"I lost mine," Courfeyrac said.

"So maybe Joly did, too. Or they just didn't think about his phone, you can get kind of mixed up when something like this happens." Bahorel squeezed Courfeyrac's shoulder. "For now, what we should do is go back to Musichetta's--get you somewhere safe and see if there's any other news."

When they arrived at the apartment, only Musichetta and Marius and Jehan were there. Feuilly answered all their anxious questions while Courfeyrac dropped into a chair and shook some more, Marius absently rubbing his shoulders.

A few minutes after they arrived, Jehan's phone rang; it was Grantaire, calling to let them know that Enjolras had just arrived at Joly and Bossuet's apartment, limping on a twisted ankle and livid at TEC, but otherwise no worse for wear. Of Joly and Ep, there was no word yet.

"They're together," Feuilly repeated for the third or fourth time, trying to reassure himself of it. "I saw them just before everything fell apart. They'll watch out for each other."

"I'm going back out to look around--I'll be back half an hour," Bahorel announced, and left again.

"Feuilly, are you hurt?" Jehan asked. "You're holding your arm strangely."

Feuilly shook his head. "It doesn't hurt--" he began, before realizing that his shoulder was, in fact, starting to throb as the adrenaline wore away. He pulled down his shirt at the collar and was surprised to find that his shoulder was swelling quickly, a deep red-purple bruise coming in. "Oh. I don't remember that happening."

"Can you move it?" Jehan asked. Gingerly, Feuilly moved his arm side to side, down, and--he tried to raise it but had to stop just above the level of his shoulder. "I wish Joly was here," Jehan sighed. "I don't know what that means. I pick up a little at the clinic, but I just do record-keeping, I don't watch the doctors treat people."

"We'll have Joly look at your arm when he gets back," Musichetta promised. "For now, try not to move it."

A quiet but insistent knocking came at the door. Everyone stopped and watched as Musichetta crossed the room to open it. Ep stood there, shifting from foot to foot as she looked up and down the street, drying blood on her lips and hands.

Musichetta pulled her inside. "Are you okay? There's blood on your face."

She nodded jumpily, rubbing her arms as if cold, even though it was a warm night. "Fine. Got hit in the nose, that's all."

"Where's Joly?" Feuilly asked her.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean?" Feuilly's fingers started tingling, his ears buzzing as if everything was happening far away. "You were with him. I _saw_ you with him."

Ep shook her head. "The guards came and everyone was pushing and running. I--we got separated."

She was looking down at the floor, picking nervously at a loose thread in the hem of her shirt. Feuilly didn't believe her. "You mean you left him."

"Hey--" Marius began, but all Feuilly's nervous tension and fear was suddenly erupting into anger--and the skinny woman standing in the middle of Musichetta's living room looked too much like the girl who had time and time again let Lark be hurt to spare herself.

"You got scared," he accused her, "and you bailed."

Her lip jutted out stubbornly. "There was a lady who was hurt, I _tried_ to get him to go, but he wouldn't listen. I wasn't going to--I was--"

"You were saving your own skin--just like you always have." He knew he was being cruel, but all he could think of were the nights Eponine had watched in silence while Lark cried, the welts on Lark's skin for things Eponine had done.

Tears flashed in Ep's eyes. "I'm not the same person," she said quietly. "And they had guns, okay? _Yes_ , I ran away--because I didn't want to get shot. But I was going to go back for him. I just . . . I couldn't see him, and I didn't know what to do."

"Bullshit," Feuilly spat.

"Stop it," Courfeyrac broke in, stepping in between them, hands raised. "Let's not fight--especially not over this. You and I were there, Feuilly, and we didn't get Joly out either. It's not fair to blame Ep for something we did too."

Feuilly knew he would soon feel ashamed over what he'd said, but right now his skin was still hot with anger, his ears ringing. "It's not the same," he muttered. "I know her."

"You _don't!_ " Ep shot back. Musichetta put an arm around her shoulders and drew her over to the table. Marius offered her a damp rag to clean her face.

Courfeyrac pulled Feuilly over to the other side of the small room, wrapping him in a hug. "Joly's okay," he murmured in his ear. "He'll be just fine."

The door opened with a bang and Bahorel came inside. Everyone turned, expectant.

"Oh good, one more safe." Bahorel nodded, salute-like, to Ep. "I went by the cafeteria, nobody was there--it's closed up for the night now, so if Joly went there he wouldn't have stayed. He's not at home, either; Bossuet and Grantaire have been waiting there.

"So on the way back, I swung by the TEC offices," Bahorel said solemnly, and Feuilly's heart seized. "There are six bodies there, still lying out in the street. But none of them are him--I checked." Feuilly shivered, imagining Bahorel crouching in the darkened street, flipping over corpses one by one to look for his friend.

"All right," Musichetta said slowly. "So he's okay. We don't know where he ended up, but he made it out of the fighting. We just have to find him."

"He didn't go home, and he didn't come here," Marius said, "so where else might he go?"

"We just ran away without thinking," Courfeyrac pointed out. "We didn't have a destination in mind until we had the time to stop and see what we were near. He could've gone in any direction, and he would probably just pick the person's housing he was closest to."

"So we should have someone at each apartment," Musichetta reasoned. "Or at least leave a note and a phone. That doesn't leave a lot of people for going out and looking."

"I can," Courfeyrac volunteered. "Enjolras hurt his ankle, so he should be the one staying at our apartment. I'll just start working through the neighborhoods around mine."

"I share housing with four other people," Feuilly offered. "If he goes there--and I don't know how he would end up there, it's the farthest away of anyone's, and it's hard to wander into the bonded worker district without realizing it--but if he does, there'll be someone there, at least. So I can help look, too."

"I'll leave a note at my place, and then go up to the farm," Bahorel suggested. "You never know."

"He isn't going to my place; he doesn't even know where it is," Ep said quietly. "I'll take a walk down toward the Bottle Street neighborhood."

"At two in the morning?" Courfeyrac asked, eyes wide. "One of us should go with you--maybe _all_ of us should go with you, if--"

Ep laughed harshly. "You? I'd be _less_ safe with one of you people." She shook he head, a hard smile on her lips. "I'll be fine on my own."

"Are you sure, Ep?" Marius asked. "If you want, I could--"

"I'll be fine," she repeated. "I know what I'm doing." She glanced around the room, as if challenging anyone to contradict her, but avoided Feuilly's eyes.

Feuilly, his anger swallowed up by worry again, was too tired to try to figure out whether Ep was in earnest or just playing a complicated game. He just turned away and followed Courfeyrac out into the dark street.

They searched for hours, until Feuilly could barely see straight and all the streets started blurring together into one nightmare maze of shadows and garish orange light. Every time he looped back to Musichetta's apartment, the answer was the same: No word yet. Courfeyrac tried the local police, but they were pretending ignorance of the whole disturbance; Bahorel even went back to knock on the doors of the TEC offices, with no answer. When Courfeyrac finally convinced Feuilly to lie down on his bed for a few hours of sleep before he had to work, Feuilly found himself continuing the search in his dreams, trudging down endless streets of shuttered windows and barred doors.

In the morning, nothing was any better. Feuilly went to work alone--Grantaire was grabbing a few hours of sleep underneath Musichetta's table, and then he was going to go out looking again--and struggled through the work day to keep his eyes open and get his work done. His injured shoulder had stiffened up overnight, and he could hardly move his arm at all, so he was stuck trying to do two people's work with just one hand. He tried to pick the easiest tickets that came up, so no one would notice anything out of the ordinary, but he couldn't hide the injury entirely. Maybe it was just paranoia born of a sleepless night and his worry over Joly--but it seemed like Feuilly's boss was watching him more than usual, and once Feuilly thought he saw him writing something down and then looking quickly away.

The day seemed to last hours, as Feuilly tried to pretend everything was normal while his shoulder throbbed and his head buzzed with worry. He found himself missing Grantaire's ceaseless monologuing--it would at least help him keep his mind off things. He kept making clumsy mistakes, having to redo whole jobs because he'd forgotten something simple at the beginning. He did his best to stay out of sight, and hoped that all the uproar over the previous night's violence kept attention off of him.

At the end of the work day, Feuilly trudged out the door of the mechanical center, half dead on his feet, and saw everyone in the street rushing in the same direction--toward the new Development Administration Office. He was almost afraid to ask, but nobody seemed to know what was going on, just that something big had happened. So with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Feuilly joined the flow of people.

About a block before the offices, the scattered people became a tightly packed crowd, humming with questions and rumors. Feuilly pushed his way through, squeezing between people and using his sharp elbows to create space until he stumbled out into the open area where the edge of the crowd drew back in an abrupt semicircle around the front of the office--and what lay there.

There were four bodies lying in the street.

They lay in four heaps of limbs, one sprawled out, another curled up, another's arm bent backwards under the body, as if they'd been dumped there and left to lie as they fell. Flies swarmed around the bodies in the heat of the late afternoon. The weathered pavement underneath them was red, and a few trickles of blood ran across the sloping street toward the shuffling feet of the watching crowd.

Feuilly took a few stumbling steps forward. The bodies were _awful_ , the flesh torn horribly, the limbs snapped and jutting out at angles that were wrong.

He didn't want to look at them. He made himself look anyway.

The first person was a woman, middle-aged, her jumpsuit gleaming sticky and red. Her eyes stared blankly at the sky, her broken arms and legs lying crookedly at her sides.

The second person was a very young teenager--impossible to tell the gender, the way the body had been flayed, the face swollen and bruised. The gashes stood out against the bloodless skin, deep red but no longer bleeding.

The third person lay facedown, but from the wrinkled, age-spotted skin visible on the back of their neck, it was someone old. A single wisp of white hair stirred listlessly in the breeze; all the rest of the hair was filthy and matted with blood.

The fourth person was Joly.

Feuilly took a shaky step out into the empty space in the middle of the crowd. Then another. His ears were ringing; he could barely hear the people behind him. He reached one of the rivulets of blood, and it seemed to take him a very long time to remember how to lift up his feet to step over it.

Somehow, he reached Joly, crouched down next to him. Gently, he straightened out the arms and legs. He brushed back the matted, sticky hair from his face.

"Oh my god," somebody said, behind him. Feuilly heard someone else crying quietly. He couldn't look away from the body.

There was blood everywhere, from a hundred gashes and rips in his skin. One of his arms was broken, the wrist crushed, the fingers purple with gathered blood. His shoes were gone, his shirt in tatters soaked with blood. But his face was surprisingly free from injuries, the skin clean except for a few smears of dried blood. You could still see the tear tracks down his cheeks, shiny trails of dried salt.

And Feuilly realized sickly that what had been done to Joly hadn't been quick. And the people who did it had wanted Joly's friends to know that.

 

Joly and Bossuet's tiny little half-pod was far too small for a dozen people, but they all crowded in there anyway. The air was hot and thick in the late evening heat, and not a breath of wind was stirring. Feuilly still felt sick and shaky and more horrible than he had in a long, long time, and Courfeyrac's arm around his waist didn't provide much comfort. It hurt to think about what had happened; it hurt to look at anyone else's face. It seemed like it hurt just to exist.

It had been Musichetta who'd been the practical one, reminding them they couldn't just stay there in front of the Development Administration Offices all night, that it might be dangerous to be seen there too long. That it was summer, and they needed to take care of the body properly.

And so Jehan had brought a blanket from his bed, and they rolled Joly's body into it so they could lift it by the corners. As they were leaving, an old woman came out from the crowd, her face wet with tears, a threadbare sheet clutched to her chest. She plucked at Feuilly's sleeve, pleading for help--she had nobody left--and so he and Bahorel and Jehan turned back to help her wrap up the body of the teenage girl. With the woman shuffling behind them, they carried the body after Joly's, to the city incinerator.

After that, there was nothing left to do but go back to Joly and Bossuet's--now, just Bossuet's--lodgings and try to hold each other together.

People spoke from time to time, just to break the silence, but nobody was saying anything with real meaning. (Or at least, Feuilly wasn't absorbing it.) Marius and Courfeyrac and Feuilly were wedged onto the apartment's tiny loveseat, Courfeyrac moving and shifting continually--throwing an arm over their shoulders or twining his hands in theirs, as if he was starving for contact with skin and couldn't get enough. Ep was on the floor between the couch and the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, as if trying to make herself fill as small a space as possible. Enjolras, sitting on the bed, kept dragging the nail of one thumb up and down his arm absently, not seeing to notice the red, angry line growing on his skin. Next to him, Jehan was sitting ramrod-straight and dry-eyed, his mind seemingly miles away. Bahorel had sat down with them but was back on his feet again within five minutes, and had settled for leaning against the wall by the apartment door, uncharacteristically silent. At the kitchen table, Bossuet's face was buried in his arms and he was crying steadily, as he had done without stopping since they'd left the incinerator, seemingly oblivious to Musichetta and Grantaire, who sat on either side, rubbing his back in turns.

"We'll get justice for him," Enjolras promised in a shaking voice. "We'll tell everyone what TEC did--we'll go all the way to the IHRC if we have to. We'll make them pay."

"It's not--" Courfeyrac began, then stopped, his voice choked.

"This won't just be another atrocity that gets swept under the rug. We'll keep making noise about it; we won't let them forget it or ignore it; we--"

"He's a _person_ , not a cause!" Courfeyrac burst out suddenly. Sitting next to him, Feuilly could feel his whole body trembling. "Can you--would you _please_ \--just--let it drop? For a few hours?"

Enjolras blinked, his face slack. "I--I'm not trying to, to make this into . . ." He spread his hands. "I just . . . I'm trying to, to take back what they did, to see a way for it to not be just another meaningless tragedy."

Courfeyrac shook his head. "Our friend is dead; you can't make meaning out of that. It's just--it's horrible, and . . . and making it into something you can _use_ for your cause just makes it more horrible."

"It's not my cause, it's _our_ cause!" Enjolras snapped. "Joly cared about it too. That's _why_ he was there. You can't make his death not about the cause. He would have wanted it to mean something." He faltered, unsure. "Wouldn't he?"

Feuilly--along with everyone else in the room--glanced over at Bossuet, who was still sobbing as if there were no one else in the room. It took a few minutes for Bossuet to realize that everyone was looking at him, and he stared around the room with red eyes, confused.

"What do you think we should do?" Musichetta murmured softly, brushing the tears from his cheek with one hand. "Do we fight TEC over this, or keep it private? What would he want?"

Bossuet shook his head. "I don't care," he muttered, and put his head back down on the table. No one said anything for a long moment.

"I'm sorry," Enjolras said brokenly. "I didn't mean--" He got abruptly and--awkwardly picking his way through the cramped room, tripping over Ep's feet--went outside.

Courfeyrac burst into tears, burying his face in his hands. Feuilly hesitantly put a hand on Courfeyrac's back, and Courfeyrac leaned into him.

Bahorel stood up. "I need air," he muttered. "I'm going to start kicking furniture if I stay in here. I'll be back." After a minute, Ep left too, mumbling a vague "sorry" seemingly directed at no one in particular.

Feuilly rubbed Courfeyrac's shoulders and wondered if things like this would ever stop hurting so horribly.

 

It was Grantaire who eventually got them talking- _-actually_ talking. Somewhere in the middle of the awkward silence that Enjolras and Bahorel and Ep left behind, he cleared his throat and offered, "So, did you know that I actually met Joly two years ago?" No one reacted, except for Marius, who started and looked up from staring at his feet, but Grantaire plowed on. "No really, I did. We didn't put two and two together until just a few weeks ago, but I met him way back in '29. I came into the clinic, and he was my doctor."

"He remembered you after all that time?" Courfeyrac asked.

"Well . . ." Grantaire smiled a little awkwardly. "It may have been a pretty . . . memorable injury." Musichetta laughed, though her smile was a little strained, and Grantaire's eyes widened in alarm. "Shit--no, I didn't have something stuck up my ass, okay? I know that's what everybody is thinking now, shit."

"Sure you didn't," Musichetta murmured.

"No--look, I'll tell you what it was, okay? It had, um, I accidentally glued a gallon jug, um, to my stomach?" Grantaire spread his hands. "I was working in Building Maintenance at the time, you know how those guys are down there--"

"Yes," said Courfeyrac immediately, while all the other listeners shook their heads blankly.

"Well, we'd gotten drunk, we had this industrial-strength glue, and . . ." Grantaire shrugged. "Long story short, I end up at Joly's clinic with this empty solvent jug stuck to my stomach and that's how we meet." He shook his head, smiling. "But the thing was, while I was in there . . . you know, I was kind of--I wasn't thinking too straight--"

"Really."

"Hey, I already admitted it--but so, I had somehow convinced myself that the glue was permanent and they would have to cut it off with half my gut with it, or else I would have to go through the rest of my life with the consequences of a stupid drunken afternoon--which was probably exactly what I deserved, but that didn't make it any easier to face . . . so I was--I was really scared.

"But Joly, he comes into the examining room and finds this grown-ass man who has managed to glue a literal piece of trash to his body and is now bawling like a baby over it . . . and he doesn't laugh. Not even a giggle. I don't know how he did it-- _I_ would've laughed--but he keeps a straight face and just tells me I'm gonna be fine, and gets me tissues and a glass of water, and tells me stories about shit his cousins got into until I'm less of a weepy mess."

Grantaire smiled, a little on the edge of weepiness again. "I'm not saying he didn't laugh afterward, I'm sure he did--I _hope_ he did, because that was fucking ridiculous, what I did to myself. But while I was in there, he never treated it as anything other than a legitimate medical condition that could happen to a real adult. And that . . . that helped, a lot." He took a deep, shaky breath, and ran a hand through his hair. "Courf, your turn."

"My turn for what?"

"How'd you meet Joly?"

Courfeyrac smiled, pushing himself up off Feuilly's shoulder. "I did the lights in the clinic where he worked--this was back when he was at the TEC branch, before the independent clinic. He always offered me candy from the jar he kept for kids who had to get the vaccination series. There was this one time . . ."

Enjolras returned during the middle of Courfeyrac's story, and slipped quietly across the room to his spot on the bed. When Courfeyrac had finished, Musichetta remembered a funny incident from one of the Friends of BCA's first visits to the southwest quarter.

And on it went. The air in the close little room seemed to grow a little less heavy as they shared funny stories, important words and memories of open arms just when they were needed most, elaborate pranks and bizarre antics, happy little moments of everyday life. Bossuet stopped crying and raised his head from the table; he didn't add any stories of his own, but he leaned on Musichetta's shoulder and listened to the others spread out their memories of Joly's life.

It was around the time that Bahorel came back (his hair soaked with sweat, but calmer) that Feuilly finally offered a memory of his own--the time he and Joly had created a makeshift ventilator for a wheezing old woman in the Needle District, where the vapors from the refinement plant ate away at the buildings and streets, leaving them pock-marked and discolored. Neither of them had had even half the knowledge needed to build such a machine; Joly knew nothing about machinery and had only the vaguest guesses about the science of filtering fumes from air, and Feuilly couldn't read and barely knew what lungs were. But somehow, over two hours and with a lot of taking things apart and putting them together agian, they'd managed to cobble together two broken A/C units and a cheap ore-testing kit into a machine that kept the woman alive for another seven months.

"We would always stop by to check on her, when we were in the area," Feuilly recalled. "She'd gotten mixed up about his name, though--or maybe he reminded her of someone else she knew--so she always called him Nicolo. But he answered to it anyway."

His throat tightened and he stopped abruptly; the story didn't really go anywhere after that, anyway. Grantaire took up the thread, remembering how easygoing Joly always was--except when it came to sanitizing medical instruments and trying to communicate with ghosts. Feuilly brushed at his stinging eyes and wondered how talking about Joly made his absence hurt both less and more at the same time.

All evening long, he kept glancing over at Bossuet--he couldn't stop himself--at the hopeless slump of his shoulders, at the way his eyes were so tired and empty, even when his lips wore a faint smile. He wondered if Bossuet thought regretted it, letting himself love someone so deeply, when this was the inevitable outcome, whether it happened now or in a week or in twenty years. Was it worth it, to him?

Feuilly remembered the coversation he'd overheard between Joly and Bossuet and Grantaire a few weeks ago, the night when they been so bewildered about why Feuilly was so slow to count people as his friends. They might understand better now, he thought. But knowing he'd been right didn't make him feel any better.


	7. Chapter 7

Feuilly's boss met him at the door of the workshop the next morning, stepping in front of him just as he was going to clock in.

"You'll need to go down to HCD today," he said. He handed Feuilly a narrow slip of gray plastic stamped with text that Feuilly couldn't read. "Go to the main desk, they'll tell you where to go."

"Okay," Feuilly said. He glanced nervously at the clock--forty more seconds and he'd be late clocking in, and the fine would set him back two weeks. He made another move toward the sensor. "Can I just clock in first?"

The boss shook his head. "It won't take your card--you're off my roster now. Uh--sorry." He shifted uneasily, then turned to go back inside the shop, leaving Feuilly standing alone in the hallway, the shiny gray slip clutched in his hands and a feeling of dread building in his stomach.

When he presented the slip at the Human Capital Development desk, the worker clicked his tongue. "Your shift started more than two hours ago," he said.

"What? No, I--I start at eight. I was there, I just couldn't clock in--"

The desk worker shook his head. "Your transfer says you start at six, at Southwest Plant D. That's a thirty-minute walk, you'd better get moving."

"But no one told me I--" Feuilly began, before realizing the futility of arguing with the great grinding beaurocracy of TEC. "Okay," he sighed. "How do I get there."

The plant was deep in the Needle District, the part of the city way on the south side that was constantly overshadowed by foul-smelling clouds of smoke, and Feuilly was short of breath long before he got to the huge Plant D building. He presented his slip to the guard at the door (trying to hide the nausea that swept over him at the man's blank black uniform, so much like the ones from two nights ago). The guard waved him inside, and Feuilly stepped into the worst place he'd seen since coming to Beta Caeli A.

The plant was one giant room, dark with soot, the air oppressively hot, even this early in the morning. A giant octagonal tower dominated the room, leaking black smoke at the top and flickers of orange light at the bottom. Workers, antlike next to the tower's bulk, swarmed around its base and picked their way up the rickety walkway that spiraled up its sides. On one side of the room, people unloaded carts piled high with raw ore--the same carts Feuilly had once worked to fill up, back when he started in Minerals Processing. On the other side, the molten iron flowed out of the tower in a wide chanel that radiated such a fierce heat that Feuilly could feel it all the way from across the room.

Feuilly's new boss was a short woman whose face was scarred all over with old burns. She looked him up and down, unimpressed, then stomped off, muttering about the central office and they way they kept sending weaklings who wouldn't last two months. A minute later, she was back with a pair of heavy gloves and a key; she shoved them into Feuilly's hands and announced that she would give him the orientation now, since the other new transfer had never showed up.

The orientation took about five minutes. Feuilly's job was painfully simple: Carry loads of ore and furnace fuel up the walkway to be loaded at the top of the furnace. The plant ran on raw human power, inefficient and very disposable, next to useless as individuals and barely functional in a crowd--but cheaper than spending precious fuel to move the product.

The safety rules were equally easy to remember. Don't touch anything hot, don't stare directly at the blast furnace, try not to breathe too much up at the top of the ramp. Other than that--"Half an hour for lunch; no overtime at this location; don't be late, don't skip out early, don't fall asleep on the clock--you know the drill." And with that, she pushed him toward the loading area to pick up his first load of ore and follow the others up the ramp. The purpose of the key she'd given him was never covered.

Feuilly had never seen the inside of an iron refinery before (on Gideon, they hadn't had a fuel source to support that kind of operation, so they'd just shipped out raw ore), but he'd heard workers talk about the refining plants before, back when he worked in Minerals Processing. It had always been as a warning--don't skip work, or they'll send you down to Plant D. Don't be insubordinate, or they'll send you down to Plant D. Don't smell up the break room, they'll send you down to Plant D. It'd been like a running joke, and Feuilly assumed that the supposed badness of the assignment nobody wanted was part of the joke. It couldn't be that bad, could it?

In his first few hours in Plant D, he found out it could. The loads of ore and fuel were packed full, and there was no way to carry them that didn't leave a deep ache in your back after only a few trips. The walkway they had to take them up was shaky and so narrow two people could barely pass each other on it, and so Feuilly was always staggering into people on their way down as he made his way up the ramp. Unused to the weight and terrified by the way the walkway trembled under his feet, he moved far too slowly, and spent every trip with a backlog of people trapped behind him, their complaining blending together with the roaring of the furnace in his ears.

The whole long trip was miserable: At the bottom, the heat from the furnace was intense, even through the tower's thick concrete walls, and Feuilly was afraid to touch the metal railing because it would almost certainly burn him. But as you neared the top, even as the heat eased up a bit, the fumes grew worse and worse. Feuilly tried to keep in mind the boss's terse advice--"try not to breath too much at the top of the ramp"--but by that point he was always gasping for breath and he needed every breath he could suck in, even if it left him coughing and choking. The people who worked at the top of the tower, actually loading the ore and fuel into the blast furnace, sucked at their ancient, ragged filter masks and stared blankly at him with soot-ringed eyes as he fled back down the ramp.

By the end of that first day, Feuilly was too tired to even put words to all the ways he hurt. His back ached. His hands were blistered from the rough inside of the gloves, and he was dizzy from the heat. His eyes burned, his legs burned, his throat burned. He couldn't take a deep breath without coughing. He'd used up every ounce of energy he had and more, just making those last few trips up the ramp. And still, between showing up three hours late and working too slowly for TEC's liking, he'd lost probably two week's pay.

And he'd have to do it all over again tomorrow.

Coming out of the plant to see the sun already sinking in the east, Feuilly understood for the first time why people lived in the Needle District. He'd always been mystified why anyone would choose to stay in one of those decaying old houses, the dregs of the city's prefab buildings, where the air was always heavy with smoke and you left fingerprints in the grime on everything you touched. Now, he was considering lying down in the street right outside the plant. The walk across the city was so far, and he had to be back there at 6 the next morning--it didn't seem worth it, for a few hours of sleep in a hard bed.

Somehow, inertia kept him shuffling on, one foot in front of the other, through the southern section of the city and into the district where he lived. The air got better as he walked, and he closed his eyes and breathed it in and tried--just for now--to think about nothing else.

When he reached his building, Courfeyrac was waiting on the step, chin propped on his hands, staring down at the ground. He jumped up when Feuilly approached, running to Feuilly to catch him in a hug.

"Is everything okay? You weren't at work, your boss said you'd been transfered but he didn't know where. I was--I was worried, what if it wasn't . . . you know?" Courfeyrac pulled back and looked at Feuily's soot-stained clothes and face. "Are you okay? What happened?"

For some reason he didn't understand, Feuilly's eyes welled up with tears. "Yeah," he managed. "I'm fine."

Courfeyrac pulled him into another hug, and Feuilly closed his eyes, resting his forehead against Courfeyrac's shoulder. "What happened, Feuilly?" Courfeyrac asked again, his voice quiet in Feuilly's ear.

"I don't know, they just transfered me." Feuilly mumbled. "It has to be about the protest, right? My boss must have noticed how tired I was, and that my shoulder was hurting me, and he reported me--or someone did. And this is TEC punishing me for it."

"Where did they transfer you to?"

"One of the refinery plants. It's . . . I don't know how I'm going to keep doing it, Courf. It's so bad. People die there."

"Oh, Feuilly." Courfeyrac rubbed his shoulders. "What can we do? Is there any way we can get you transfered back?"

"No, please--I don't want to call any more attention to myself; they'll just find a way to make it worse. I just--" He pulled away, rubbing his eyes. "I need to get some rest. It'll be . . . I'll do it. Somehow." He turned to go inside, but Courfeyrac caught at his arm.

"Did you eat dinner yet?"

Feuilly shook his head. "All I want to do is sleep."

"You need to eat something, Feuilly. Okay? Tomorrow will be worse if you haven't eaten."

Feuilly felt ready to collapse from exhaustion, but Courfeyrac did have a point, so he let him pull him down the street to the nearest cafeteria and buy him something hot to eat--he barely noticed what it was. When Feuilly started nodding off right there at the table, Courfeyrac insisted on walking him back to his house, even though it was barely half a block, and arguing with him would have taken energy Feuilly simply didn't have.

"Hang in there, Feuilly," Courfeyrac told him, squeezing his arm, when they reached his door. "You'll get through this, okay? We're going to figure something out."

"Okay," Feuilly said. He would have told Courfeyrac not to bother--there wasn't anything they could do against TEC on this, and what was the point of trying. But once again, it was easier not to argue.

  


The next several days passed in a blur. Feuilly dragged himself out of bed, staggered up the long ramp dozens of times every day, forced himself to eat something before collapsing into bed at night. He was keeping up, making it through every day--but only just barely. Every morning, he felt sure that this was the day he would break, that this was when it would become too much and he'd . . . and _something_ would happen. He wasn't sure what--he didn't see any way out, not even a bad one--but the days were so long, and the blast furnace tower so high, he walked into the plant every morning certain that he wouldn't be able to keep it up. But every night, he would round the corner of his street and see Courfeyrac waiting on his steps with a plastic container of food to urge on him, and he would realize that he'd made it one more day. So maybe it would be tomorrow, then, when he finally couldn't do it any longer.

He very nearly hit his breaking point the day six o'clock came and yet the closing bell didn't ring. Feuilly stared at the big clock on the wall--6:05--through bleary, smoke-stinging eyes and wondered if it had broken, if he was going blind, if he'd lost all grip on reality and was imagining the fact that the workday ended at 6 (or that it ended at all, ever).

Someone jostled him roughly as they passed him on their way to the loading carts, and Feuilly was jolted back to reality.

"Hey--aren't we done at six?" he called after the man, his voice rough.

"It's seven tonight," the man called back. "Cycle Day tomorrow."

Cycle Day. Feuilly had so lost track of the days that he'd forgotten the company holiday--the day off that all TEC employees got every forty days--was coming up. On the one hand, that meant he didn't have to work tomorrow. He'd be able to . . . he'd be able to sleep. There were probably other ways he could use the time as well, but right now sleep was the only thing Feuilly could really look forward to with any honesty.

But even the prospect of a full day off was so distant it hardly seemed to matter because before that happened, there was the extra hour that everyone worked on the evening before Cycle Day. And that extra hour was seeming all but impossible to Feuilly right now. Seven o'clock might have been weeks away; tomorrow was centuries distant.

He almost broke down crying right there in the middle of the plant floor. Another hour. He _couldn't_ \--there was no way--

Lots of people had it worse, Feuilly told himself. Pull yourself together, he told himself, slapping his numb cheeks. One step at a time, he told himself.

It didn't help much. But somehow he managed to walk back over to the carts and pick up another load of ore. Then carry it to the base of the tower. Then up the ramp--one step at a time, one step at a time. Somehow, the hour passed.

Maybe it was the evening's brisk wind, which was bringing in cool, fresh air from the distant mountains; maybe it was the knowledge that he wouldn't have to go back to work for nearly thirty-six hours--whatever the reason, Feuilly felt a little bit better as he made his way back across the city. His headache receeded to a dull background ache, and feet felt a little lighter. He decided to take advantage of this surge of energy and stop by the TEC store on his way home to pick up some new boot soles and a heavy sewing needle so he could use the rest day to fix his boots, whose thin soles were beginning to singe alarmingly on the hot walkway around the tower.

The company store was crowded with bonded workers doing last-minute shopping before Cycle Day--other stores would be open the next day, of course, since it was only a TEC holiday--but the official TEC store was the only place you could use company credit, and if you were a bonded worker that was the only official money source you had. You could also barter, which wasn't _actually_ illegal, but because of some technicality, there was a high penalty attached to it, and you had to be really careful. Sometimes it was just easier to pay the inflated price at the company store.

Feuilly placed his purchases on the counter and handed his ID card over to the hairred clerk. She keyed in the product codes, then swiped his card to charge them to his account (Feuilly looked away so he didn't have to consciously register the fact that he was paying a week's wages for two thin strips of heatproof imitation rubber). And then she frowned.

"Sorry," she sighed. "I need a manager's override for some reason." She waved over the manager, who took over for her at the terminal and typed in a few keys. He echoed the clerk's frown, squinting and peering in closer at the screen, as if that would clear up the mystery.

"What the hell . . ." he muttered. "Why is this . . ."

"What's wrong?" Feuilly asked.

"It's weird, it's saying . . ." The manager didn't finish his sentence, but started typing again. Then the frown fell of his face and he laughed. "Wow. Okay, pal, I don't know what you did. But wow."

"Why? What is it?"

"There's a hold on your account," the man explained. "Because the balance is so high. It's an automatic thing, the computer just puts it on anyone who hits a certain level. It's to weed out freeloaders who don't have families and so they try to game the system by bonding themselves out and then not working and racking up an infinite debt--which it looks at first like you're trying to do. But your work attendance is in good standing, so you can make your purchase. I just have to put in my code."

"Wait, you said my balance is high?"

The manager laughed. "Uh, yeah, I'll say it is. Dunno if I've ever seen one that bad." He swung the screen around to show Feuilly a string of numbers. According to the computer, Feuilly's total debt was . . . a very big number. A number he didn't know how to read, it had so many digits.

"That can't be right," Feuilly said desperately. "I've been working every day since I got here--I've never missed a single day of work. I was late clocking in last week, but just a few hours, and it was because I'd been transfered. The computer must have made a mistake."

"Mmm . . ." The man turned the screen back and hit a few more keys. "Nope, it all looks legit. It's all--well, mostly all--from that fine last week, looks like . . . yeah, it was put in the same day you were transfered to . . . wow, from Mechancial to Plant D! I dunno what you did, kid, but you made someone real angry."

Feuilly shook his head. "I . . . I didn't know," he said dully. "Noboy told me."

"Aw, kid." Some of the man's amusement dropped away, and his eyes softened. "That's low. Here, I'll print out the statement for you, you can take it in to your boss. Maybe it is some kind of computer error--a data entry tech fell asleep on the keyboard, something like that."

"Thanks," Feuilly made himself say. He knew it wasn't an error. He'd thought being transfered to Plant D was punishment enough--but he should have known TEC could do worse. He accepted the document the man handed him anyway, folding it up and stuffing it in a pocket of his jumpsuit as he left the store.

Courfeyrac and Enjolras were waiting by the door of Feuilly's apartment, squatting in the shade the building cast in the low late-evening light.

"Happy Cycle Day!" Courfeyrac sang out as Feuilly approached. "Listen, do you feel like celebrating a little? We're meeting at the cafeteria to talk about--well, everything--and I thought, since you don't have to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow . . . ?"

Feuilly hesitated. He was tired--but tired was quickly becoming a constant, just part of the background for him. And he _did_ want to be involved with whatever went on with "everything," at least as much as he could. The world hadn't ended just because he'd been moved to Plant D.

"All right," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Just--let me put this stuff inside."

As they walked through the busy streets, Courfeyrac and Enjolras discussed the results of the protest that had flared up--and then out--so suddenly.

"Nobody's really talking about the people who died," Courfeyrac said sadly. "Neither the people who were killed in the protest itself, or the four afterward."

"They're not really talking about the protest either," Enjolras added. "Everyone knows about it--they _must_ know, TEC was hardly quiet about the murders. But they're not talking about it. Or at least, I haven't heard anyone discussing it."

"I haven't either--nobody in the refining plant has even mentioned the protest since I was moved there. It's like the protest didn't even happen."

"That's what they wanted." Courfeyrac kicked an empty bottle, and it went skittering along the uneven pavement and into an alley. "What they did . . . that was to scare us. To make everyone to afraid to speak out against them for fear it would happen to them, too. If nobody talks about it, it might as well not have happened."

"If that's their plan, it's working better than I would have thought," Enjolras said. "The whole city is cowed into silence--and they didn't really crack down too severely. I mean, what they did was horrible . . . but it was only ten people--out of two hundred or so who were at the protest. I keep waiting for them to do something else, something that would punish everyone who was involved. But as far as I know, the only other thing they did was transfering Feuilly to the refining plant."

"It's strange," Courfeyrac agreed. "Feuilly can't have been the only one who they knew was there. But I haven't heard of anyone else getting in trouble over it."

"Do you think your transfer could have been a coincidence?" Enjolras asked Feuilly. "A computer error or something?"

Feuilly shook his head. "No, they definitely meant it was a warning. They fined me at the same time, the morning after the protest. Both things couldn't have happened by accident."

"Wait, they fined you?" Courfeyrac asked. "You didn't tell me that."

"I just found out today," Feuilly said. "When I went to buy something at the TEC store, the message came up on my account." He dug the statement out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Actually--could you read it for me? I don't actually know how much it is."

Courfeyrac took the statement and glanced over it. His eyes grew wide and, wordlessly, he handed it over to Enjolras.

Enjolras stared at it for a minute before saying slowly, "That's . . . um. Feuilly. That's more than five trillion dollars."

"Can . . . can you read the whole number?" Feuilly didn't know why, but he wanted hear the whole thing put into words, to know the exact number that would overshadow his future.

"Uh--it's . . . five trillion, two hundred sixty-eight billion, three hundred thirty-six million, thirty-one thousand, four hundred--and, um, two. Dollars."

"Okay." Feuilly took a long breath. "That's a lot, isn't it."

"It's about two-thirds of the population of New Terra," Enjolras began, "or five times the . . ." he broke off and just nodded. "Yeah. It's a lot."

"I'm never going to pay that off, am I?" He tried to make light of it, but he could feel his smile cracking around the edges.

Courfeyrac touched his upper arm, hesitantly. "I'm so sorry, Feuilly," he said. For some reason, his eyes glistened with tears.

"It doesn't make any difference, really." Feuilly tried to laugh. "I wasn't going to be able to pay my debt off anyway--everyone knows, once you're in the bonded labor system, you never get out. Nothing's really changed."

"But it--" Courfeyrac stopped himself, shaking his head. He took a deep breath. "Can I hug you anyway?"

Feuilly shrugged, but he was already stepping into Courfeyrac's arms, hungry for the comfort in a way he didn't understand. It was true, after all--nothing had changed. If he was honest with himself, he'd known for months that he was never going to make it out of the system. He'd come to the realization very gradually, watching the numbers on his account tick down so, so slowly, cycle after cycle--and sometimes bounce back up, if he'd been sick or needed new supplies. Even if he hadn't ever put it in words, he'd known.

But apparently, he'd still managed to cling to hope. With a debt of a few million, it was still possible to dream, to believe that he'd manage it somehow--he'd work harder, he'd be careful, he'd get lucky. Now, it was impossible to hold onto those lies. Five trillion dollars was too huge and real a thing even to dream around; not even his most optimistic daydreams could get him out of this one. Feuilly was going to be a slave all his life.

"It's just more incentive for us to fight the bonded labor system," Enjolras was saying. "They shouldn't be able to do things like this to anyone, for any reason. But maybe we can use this to fight back, because this fine, it's definitely not legal. Cost of transportation to the planet, room and board, and so on, I can see how they make that sound legitimate, but this? This is so arbitrary and obviously contrived; there's got to be someone we can go to to appeal it."

Feuilly took a deep breath and pushed himself away from Courfeyrac's chest. "It's all right. There are more important things to worry about right now. We should get to the meeting." Enjolras tried to protest, but Courfeyrac put a hand on his arm and he dropped the subject for the moment, to Feuilly's relief.

This would be good for him, Feuilly thought as they pushed through the crowd toward the bright fluorescent lights of the cafeteria. He'd been so caught up in his own misfortunes, he needed something to pull him out of this self-absorbtion and remind him that there were real problems out there, issues much more serious than his own trivial setbacks. More than ever, he needed the Friends of BCA. He needed work to occupy his mind and give him something to hope for--something he could do to make things better for someone else.

But that night's gathering was a very subdued one. Joly's absence at the table Grantaire had dubbed the "party table" was impossible to ignore, like the gap left behind by a missing tooth. Feuilly's eyes kept skating over in spite of himself to fall on the empty seat, like he couldn't stop checking to see if it was still true. Even when he managed to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, he could hear the silence over his left shoulder--where there should have been muffled laughter and the click of plastic dishes and utensils as Joly fidgeted with anything within hands' reach.

And there was something missing from the people who were there as well. Bossuet still sat in blank silence, his usually bright eyes dull and red-rimmed. Grantaire was as friendly and affectionate as always--if not more so--but there was a touch of something fragile, even manic, in his smile. Marius was jumpy and spent so much time looking around that he missed most of the conversation. Musichetta just simmered with anger.

When they had spent some time just checking in with each other--Bahorel distributing rib-crushing hugs all around, Courfeyrac buying food for anyone he could bully into accepting it--Enjolras brought up the question everyone was thinking: "Are we going to keep going with this?"

"They want us to be scared," Courfeyrac said again. "They had no other reason to do what they did in such a--horrible way. They want everyone to think, 'It's too dangerous to oppose TEC, I'll just suck it up and make the best of it, because if I try to make a difference I'll just end up getting hurt.'"

"And it seems like that message got through," Jehan said. "This is a generalization, of course, but people seem to have pretty much gone quiet. Even the conversations about the copper development in general--who's going to apply for a permit, plans to travel out to Bashang Station--it's _all_ dried up, as if people feel that saying anything at all about TEC is too dangerous."

"But they might not be wrong," Marius said quietly. "We know they're not afraid to . . . well, to do anything."

"And nobody's done anything about it," Musichetta hissed. "The government should have come down on them; even out here in the outer ring, that's still murder."

"So that's one option," Enjolras said. "We could push for justice for Joly and the others who were killed; try to make enough noise--either here on Beta Caeli A or by approaching the Colonial Authority--that TEC is called to account for those crimes."

"What goes does that do, though?" Bahorel asked. "It doesn't change what happened--maybe it makes it less likely to happen again, at least not in the exact same way. But what we really need is to get rid of TEC. While they control BCA, nobody is going to feel safe--or free."

"Which, I think we're seeing, are almost the same thing," murmured Courfeyrac.

"And that's the second option: We focus on challenging TEC's control over the planet." Enjolras looked around the group. "Not that this has to be something separate from option one--you could say this is just another way of continuing Joly's story. Or avenging his death. What happened to him and the other nine was all about power, after all. If we take away TEC's power, we hit them where it hurts the most, and we are striking directly at what they tried to take when they killed Joly."

"But how," Jehan said, and it was almost more of a statement than a question. "I'm all for hurting TEC, but we have nothing to hit them _with._ TEC has the Colonial Authority on their side, and their security corps, and trillions of dollars. If the other people of Beta Caeli A don't support us, then we've got nothing."

"There's something to be said for knowing when you've lost," Grantaire put in. "It's not glorious, maybe--but neither is overshooting and ruining not only your cause but also your entire lives in a spectacular fuckup because you tried to bite off more than you could chew. Well, I guess you could say it's glorious in its own unique way--or impressive, at least. But I'm not sure it's the kind of glory any of us here is looking for."

Enjolras nodded. "There's a third option," he said slowly. "We could decide that we've taken this as far as we can, and it's time to stop. I think," he paused. "I think we're all very tired. And we're grieving the death of our friend. It could be this isn't the right time for political fighting."

"And we just drop it?" Bahorel said, shifting restlessly in his chair. "What about what happened to Joly? Do we just let that go?"

"He's dead either way," Bossuet said hollowly.

The group fell silent at that. When Feuilly looked around the table, he saw a lot of eyes focused on hands; a few people seemed to suddenly remember about their now-cold plates of food.

"If I can add something?" Marius offered after a minute. "Another way of looking at it is that it's not really our choice to make. Regardless of our reasons for attacking TEC, or how we might do it, this is about the future of Beta Caeli A. Anything that affects TEC affects the whole planet, after all. So . . . maybe it's not really our place to make this decision entirely by ourselves. We've been saying this whole time that the people of Beta Caeli A have the right to make decisions about the planet. We need to at least consider the position of the rest of the planet on the issue. And . . ." He trailed off.

"And it looks like the planet's made its choice," Courfeyrac finished.

That wasn't the end of the conversation, of course: The group continued to debate the possible approaches to challenging TEC and the ethics of making the decision as the sky grew dark outside and the cafeteria's offerings shut down to a single food line, and then to just drinks. Feuilly tried to pay attention but he was so tired, and the discussion chased the same lines of thought around and around endlessly, and he ended up falling asleep among the napkins and empty cups that littered the table.

He woke up to Courfeyrac gently poking his shoulder while saying to the group, ". . . have to make a decision eventually. I think we should put it to a vote."

They used napkins for the ballots, and Jehan passed three pens around the tables so everyone could draw the pictrogram that represented their answer (a circle for yes, crossed lines for no) to the question: Should they continue the fight against TEC? A few people scrawled their answer quickly and handed the pen quickly on to the next person; others sat thinking for a long time.

Feuilly hesitated, staring down at the scrap of napkin. He didn't want to leave things like this; it felt like letting TEC win, like allowing Joly's death to mean nothing. But if TEC had _already_ won--and with the whole city silent after everything that had happened, it seemed like they had--then lying to themselves about it wouldn't change anything. And looking at the tired lines of Bossuet's face, Feuilly wondered if what was needed most around Joly's death was not more conflict but peace, and time for healing.

He wrote his X, then passed the pen on to Grantaire.

In the end, it was nine Xs to two circles. Feuilly was surprised at the numbers; he hadn't been following the discussion perfectly, but he'd been sure at least three or four people would be in favor of fighting. But when he looked around the group, Bahorel was the only person who seemed disappointed, or at least resigned. Everyone else, even Musichetta, just looked relieved--relieved, and tired.

And if he was being honest, Feuilly felt the same way.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up: this chapter contains some health issues and anxiety/sort of almost a panic attack.

One Cycle Day wasn't nearly enough. Feuilly slept until the sun was well up in the sky, got up to eat, fixed his shoes, and slept again. In the afternoon, he walked around his neighborhood just to stretch his legs and try to feel like a real human instead of some kind of mining robot on standby, then he and a couple of his housemates worked on patching up the torn screens on their housing unit's windows. By the time evening fell, Feuilly was at once antsy with the feeling that he should be _doing_ something and weighed down with dread over the knowledge that he'd be back at work in just a few hours.

He supposed he should be grateful for the day off, but in a way, the holiday just made it worse. It had been a tease, a brief reminder of what it was like to _not_ feel exhausted and sore and sick from the heat. For the first few days after the holiday, all Feuilly could think about was what an impossibly long time 40 days was, how many days he had to get through before he could feel that way again. Then the exhaustion started building up, blurring his days together, and he stopped thinking much at all.

But it wasn't _all_ awful. Even with the long hours, and the heat, and the dangerous work, there were little moments of happiness, and Feuilly tried to hold onto them. Laughing with Courfeyrac over a bowl of soup at the cafeteria around the corner. The cool touch of the wind on the back of his neck as he left the plant at the end of the day, his clothes and skin damp with sweat. Grantaire and Bossuet dropping by just as Feuilly was going to bed to make him sample the strange new coffee drink their regular cafeteria had started selling. Enjolras updating him on the Friends of BCA's neighborhood relief efforts and eagerly asking his opinion on Bahorel's idea about developing a plant-based air filter replacement. The hushed murmur of the city waking up, as he walked to work in the morning.

It was in the middle of one of these moments--he and Courfeyrac were lingering on the street corner where their paths diverged, not ready to go home; the setting sun painted the sky above with brilliant gashes of orange and pink and purple; after a good supper the ache of exhaustion in his bones had settled to a pleasant, sleepy throb--that Feuilly realized he needed to be more careful.

"What's wrong?" Courfeyrac had noticed the way Feuilly's face stiffened.

Feuilly shook his head. "I'm just tired."

"You weren't tired a minute ago," Courfeyrac insisted, frowning. "You remembered something, or thought of something. What is it?"

"I just . . . this is really nice. This--you, everyone--I wouldn't have gotten through the couple of weeks without you."

"And?"

Feuilly shrugged. "I just realized how much I'll miss it." And how much he relied on Courfeyrac and the others--but especially Courfeyrac, who could always tell when Feuilly was too tired to talk or could use someone to work the stiffness out of his bad shoulder, and whose genuine smile never faltered through any of it. How he would have drowned without him, these past weeks. How he was afraid he'd drown after all when Courfeyrac, inevitably, moved on. He couldn't say that, of course; it wasn't fair to act like . . . like he had a claim on any of them.

"What do you mean?" Courfeyrac stepped a little closer, lowering his voice. "You're not planning to . . . to run away, are you? I thought it was too dangerous to--"

"No, no, no," Feuilly said quickly. "No, I'm not that stupid; I'm not going to leave. But you are. I mean, eventually." Courfeyrac was just looking at him, still confused, and Feuilly found himself rambling. "I just mean that people are always moving around here, in and out of the city, out to different mining stations, even off to other planets. It's not like there's anything that wonderful about St. Denis--or BCA, for that matter--and things are going to be changing so quickly, with the copper and everything; I wouldn't be surprised if half the unbonded population of the city was gone by next summer." He trailed off, looking down at his hands.

"I'm not planning on leaving, Feuilly," Courfeyrac said earnestly, his forehead creasing. "My plans are to stay right here in St. Denis, where--where I'm needed."

That made sense, Feuilly realized. He'd forgotten about the Friends of BCA and their work--not being able to join in on their visits had pushed them to the back of his mind, and he'd begun to think of them simply as a group of friends, not a relief organization--but Courfeyrac was very committed to the group. It was natural that he'd want to stay in St. Denis as long as the organization was still active there. And given Enjolras's tenacity and Courfeyrac's indefatiguable passion, it could be several years before the group broke up and Courfeyrac moved on.

Relief flooded Feuilly's chest at the knowledge that he had time, that he didn't have to brace himself for that loss just yet. "Okay," he said, realizing Courfeyrac was waiting for some kind of a response from him. "Okay, good."

  
  


When Feuilly first saw the graffiti, his only thought was how strange it was that it was written in text--way out here in the Needle District.

Someone had scrawled the short phrase onto the wall of Plant D with charcoal. Feuilly was running early for once, so he paused on his way into the plant, to see if he could read whatever it was someone thought was important enough to risk a fine for writing it on a TEC building. But the writing was in text, instead of pictographs, and the only word he recognized were the three letters of "BCA." It didn't really matter anyway; the angry rainclouds overhead promised to wash it all away by the end of the day.

Despite the ominous dark clouds, the rain didn't hit until afternoon. Feuilly was surprised when it came, because he could actually hear it falling on the roof, even over the roar of the furnace and the machinery. Most of the time, the plant seemed like an island of noise and heat, completely cut off from what was going on outside. Feuilly would leave at the end of one day to find the air outside almost cool, with a violent wind whipping things around, and he'd be shivering in his damp clothes by the time he got home; another day, the outside world would be still and warm and sunny, but the oppressive heat inside the plant would have been no different. But rain, it seemed, was the exception--the one type of weather that could make itself felt even inside Plant D.

As he worked, Feuilly listened to the roar of the rain against the metal roof (growing louder and receeding as he trudged up and down the ramp), and tried to imagine being out in it. The cool water falling on his hot face . . . soaking into his hair . . . running down his back inside his shirt. At first, the thought was refreshing. But as the afternoon went on, imagining the cool outside seemed to be making the hot, stale air inside even harder to put up with.

With each load he took up the tower, Feuilly's energy was quickly draining away, the last few yards toward the furnace opening becoming harder and harder to climb. His head was pounding, and he was sweating and out of breath like he'd been on his very first day. Maybe his brain was getting tired, too: It wasn't until he staggered dizzily on the ramp and almost pitched himself over the railing that he realized that this was not normal afternoon fatigue.

Dazedly, he looked around at the other workers. Several of the people on the ramp were weaving around as much as he had been; one had dropped his load of ore, sending it sliding down the ramp to knock a few other workers down. Above him, Feuilly could see two of the workers at the top of the tower, the ones who loaded the furnace opening, slumped on the platform, their heads between their knees.

Even as he counted off these circumstances, Feuilly couldn't put them together somehow; he felt there was a conclusion to pull from all this, but it was like his brain was muffled in thick cloth and he couldn't get to it. Someone jostled his shoulder hard, pushing past him on the ramp, and he remembered the work he had to do. Slowly he straightened up and started up the walkway again: One foot, then the other. His ears were buzzing, and his mouth dry.

Raised voices came faintly from the plant floor, and Feuilly glanced down. A handful of workers had broken away from the line and were arguing with the boss. Between the roar of the furnace and the drumming of the rain on the metal roof, Feuilly couldn't hear the words, but they looked angry, gesturing wildly with their arms. The boss didn't seem to want to listen, but as Feuilly watched she finally nodded. One of the workers took off, sprinting across the plant to the opposite wall, where she pulled a lever. Feuilly was still trying to figure out why she'd run away from the argument so quickly when an alarm started blaring from somewhere overhead and red lights flashed over all the doorways.

A voice made some kind of announcement over the loudspeaker, but it was impossible to hear with the clamor that broke out from all the workers. But the tide of people that immediately started flowing down the ramp was impossible to mistake. Feuilly stumbled along with them, still unsure what was going on, but with a growing panic beating under his skin.

Something was wrong with the air. This wasn't supposed to happen not here, not down here on the surface. Here the air was natural, and you had a whole planet's worth of it to breathe; you weren't supposed to run out, it wasn't supposed to go bad on you. Those things were only supposed to happen on shitty little moon colonies where machines filtered your air and every molecule you breathed had been recycled a thousand times. _Those_ were the kind of places where the filtration system broke down--where you didn't have the parts you needed and the next mechanic ship wouldn't be in for at least two months--where you found yourself trying to cobble a solution together from broken motors and the chemical bricks from the water purification system (which you couldn't spare, but water toxins would kill you slower than suffocation, and you might have two months)--working feverishly against time while trying not to breathe too much, trying not to waste air--your hands slippery with sweat on the handles of generations-old tools--panting for breath as the air grew thicker--wire and screws slipping from clumsy fingers--your vision burring--heartbeat pounding in your ears--

The shock of the cold rain against his face jarred Feuilly out of his panic. As they passed through the plant doors and out into the street, the crowd that had carried Feuilly along with it even when he wasn't really seeing where he was going spread out. Some people sat down heavily right outside the doors; others jogged farther down the block to get away from the bad air. Feuilly let his momentum carry him across the street to the abandoned housing unit opposite the plant, and there he let his trembling legs give way, sliding down the side of the building to sit on the ground. He rested his forehead on his knees and breathed long, shaky breaths, trying to convince himself to trust the outdoor air.

"Are you okay?" somebody asked. Feuilly lifted his head to see one of the other workers standing over him, shifting restlessly from foot to foot as he waited for Feuilly's answer.

"I'm fine," Feuilly said, but it came out breathless and unconvincing. "Just--can't shake the idea that maybe--maybe we crowded too many people onto this planet and we've used up all the air."

The worker laughed. "Impossible. Beta Caeli A's atmospheric carbon cycle has a capacity of at least eight billion humans, in addition to the native fauna, which is almost negligible, and we have just over four million colonists here."

"I know." Feuilly took another deep breath and managed a wobbly smile. "I didn't _actually_ think that we could use it all up."

"Sorry," the man said, running a hand through his hair sheepishly. "I didn't mean to be an asshole--I just like numbers, and I guess I can sometimes get carried away."

"No, it's okay," Feuilly said. "Numbers are good--you can't argue with them."

The man grinned. "Ah, you get it!" He shuffled a little closer to the prefab building, shielding his face from the rain with one arm.

"What was that in there, though?" Feuilly asked. "Do you know?"

"Buildup of carbon monoxide, probably," the man said. "The ventilation system went out; it's happened before, but usually they catch it before it gets this bad. The smelting process has all kinds of nasty byproducts--carbon monoxide is the main one, but there's also various nitrogen oxides and sulfure oxides--that are released; we're exposed to them all the time anyway, but usually the fans keep the levels low enough that we don't feel any effects."

Despite the sobering nature of what he was saying, the man seemed to relax a bit as he explained. He dropped to squat beside Feuilly on the ground, blinking up at the plant in the rain. "We're supposed to have protective gear--there's a law about it somewhere. An intersystem industrial law, not BCA code. Technically, they're not breaking it, of course, because we do have the suits."

"What suits?"

"You haven't seen them?" Feuilly shook his head, and the worker laughed. "Well, when you got here, they gave you a key, right? But probably never told you what it unlocked."

"Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten all about it."

"Well, the key goes to your safety equipment locker. Everyone has one, and inside is the gear that we're supposed to all be wearing. Masks, protective jumpsuits, goggles. But you move so much slower with all that gear on, and repairing and replacing it is so expensive, that TEC would rather just nobody use it."

"But we can, if we want?"

"You _could_. You'd have to get here ten minutes early to put it on before the shift starts. And altogether it weighs about ten pounds. And odds are good your gear is torn, or malfunctioning, or three sizes too big, or just straight-up not there. You could take someone else's, but even though nobody uses them, that's technically stealing another employee's company-provided gear, and that's a major fine. Of course, you can file a request to have your own gear repaired or replaced. The request will have to be in writing, so you'd have to find someone to help you fill it out if you don't write, and it will take at least two months to be followed up on--and in the meantime, you might just happen to get transfered to a different plant, where you'd have to start the process all over again . . ."

Feuilly nodded slowly. "Yeah, I get it. They're not breaking the law, technically, but we have no way to make them actually _follow_ it. Not on our own."

"Exactly." The man rolled his shoulders, working the kinks out of his neck. "The only way it's going to change is if shit like this keeps happening and enough workers die that TEC's profits fall."

"That's awfully cynical," Feuilly pointed out, but the man shook his head.

"No, I'm serious, that's how it happens. That's why the people who work the top of the furnace get masks. They used to be in the same situation as us, but they're exposed to the worst of the fumes all the time, and enough of them died that TEC finally decided it was cheaper to at least get them masks than to keep burning through bondies up there." He shrugged. "That's how TEC works--how all the big corporations work. Profit is the only real law they know, and our lives are valuable only as far as they affect that proft."

"How do you know about all this stuff?" Feuilly asked him.

"Same reason I'm at Plant D at all--I poke my nose into what isn't any of my business." The man flashed a gritty, bitter smile. "'Go to school,' my father said, 'become a doctor, learn how the universe works.' Turns out there's a lot of how the universe works that They don't want you to know. By the time I learned to keep my head down and shut up, I was stuck here with a debt the size of a small moon and enough black marks on my record that my father decided he'd prefer it if nobody remembered I was his son."

"I'm sorry," Feuilly said. He couldn't imagine having your family turn on you like that. "That's terrible."

The man shrugged. "It was a while ago. So." He stuck out a hand to Feuilly. "I'm Combeferre, by the way."

"Feuilly," Feuilly said, shaking his hand. "So, what happens now? With the carbon . . . whatever it was."

"Carbon monoxide," Combeferre supplied. "Among other things. Now we wait for the mechanical team; it'll probably take them most of the afternoon to get the system up and running again, and all the carbon-monoxide-et-cetera out. We've got to stay, of course, because they'll want us back on the line the second it's good. But we get to sit out in the rain and breathe marginally better air for a few hours at least."

"'s okay with me," Feuilly said. He leaned his head back against the wall with a sigh and closed his eyes.

"Don't look so happy," his coworker said. "We're not getting paid for it, you know."

"I'm never getting out of here anyway. So it doesn't really make any difference to me."

As he said the words, Feuilly realized it was true. With that impossible fine on his account, at least he didn't have to worry about paying off his debt. He could just let go and take everything as it came, without scrambling to save pennies and stressing about every late arrival; he could keep his head down and maybe they'd leave him be to enjoy his few hours of freedom every evening. It was a bleak future to look forward to--but at least he didn't have to constantly worry about getting free from it. He would try to hold onto that.

"Heh. Idiots," Combeferre muttered next to him, without much bite to it.

"What?" Feuilly opened his eyes.

His coworker waved a hand at the building opposite them. "Look, somebody wrote on the wall. That's TEC property, they're just asking to be fined, or something worse."

Feuilly's vision was unblurring enough to allow him to focus on the other building now; squinting through the rain, he realized the man was talking about the graffiti he'd noticed that morning. Because the plant roof had a slight lip and there wasn't much wind to blow the rain inward, the charcoal letters were still mostly intact after all.

"It wasn't even something worth writing," Combeferre continued. "Just nonsense."

"Why, what's it say?"

"It says 'I believe in BCA.'" He laughed. "That doesn't even make any sense; is anybody doubting the existence of the planet? Why would someone risk their neck to put that on a company building? Either Cartesian skepticism is making a comeback, or someone in this neighborhood has finally lost it--not surprising, really."

 _I believe in BCA._ Feuilly heard Courfeyrac's voice again, chanting the sentence as he faced down the looming TEC headquarters, and a hundred voices echoing him, and a warm feeling spread through his chest. He tipped his head back again and let the rain wash the soot from his face.

  
  


Courfeyrac was waiting for Feuilly at the head of his street that evening, his umbrella bobbing up and down as he paced. As soon as he saw Feuilly he ran to meet him.

"Are you all right? I heard there was some kind of incident at Plant D, but I couldn't find anything out. The mechanical team that went out there didn't know anything except the specs of the fans they were supposed to repair, but it seemed like it was pretty urgent."

"I'm fine," Feuilly told him. "The ventillation system went out and some toxic gases built up, but everything's okay now." He waved off Courfeyrac's sputtering protests. "No, really, Courf, I'm fine. But listen--I found something I need to show you. Come with me!"

He turned around and retraced the route he'd taken home, Courfeyrac trotting up behind him to hold his umbrella over both of them. "What's going on?"

"Wait and see," Feuilly said. "I don't want to just tell you about it. It's not far."

A few minutes of walking brought them to the TEC store Feuilly had passed on his way home (the same one where he'd found out he was trapped in the bonded labor system for life, but that hardly seemed to matter now). He led Courfeyrac around the corner to the small alley that led back to a cluster of housing units behind the store and there, painted across the store wall in big white letters, was another set of graffiti.

"Read it," Feuilly whispered as Courfeyrac stared. He was suddenly afraid that maybe he'd mixed the characters up and this was something completely different, maybe Combeferre had read the first one wrong, maybe he had dreamed up the whole thing in a cabon-monoxide-induced hallucation, maybe . . .

" _I believe in BCA,_ " Courfeyrac murmured. He read it again and turned to Feuilly. "Do you think it means us--the protest?" As Feuilly nodded, a grin split Courfeyrac's face. "That--that means somebody remembers. Somebody else believes in what we were trying to do--so much that they'd go to the trouble and the danger of painting this on a company building--"

"This is the second one I've seen," Feuilly told him. "There was one on the plant wall this morning."

Courfeyrac's eyes widened, then he threw his arms around Feuilly, laughing delightedly. "This is--we can--we have to--" he babbled in his ear.

Feuilly laughed too--as much with the infectious rush of excitement as at Courfeyrac's incoherence. "We have find Enjolras," he agreed. "Right away."

 


	9. Chapter 9

_We're not alone_. The thought kept running through Feuilly's head, buoying him up even as the clock ran past midnight and his eyelids drooped with exhaustion. The Friends of BCA were back: Back in their corner of the cafeteria, back at their determination to not give up their planet to TEC without a fight, back to _endless_ discussion of different possible courses of action. Even as they talked round and round in circles, trying to come up with a form of resistance that might be effective against the giant corporation, Feuilly's newfound hope burned on in his chest, unfading. _We're not alone._

The others felt it too, Feuilly was sure. There was a light in Enjolras's eyes he hadn't seen in weeks, and Jehan's shoulders had dropped their slump. Courfeyrac was practically bouncing out of his chair with excitement; when Grantaire grabbed onto his arm to keep him in his seat, it was only half joking--Courfeyrac really seemed about to start runing around the cafeteria, shouting to everyone to join them. Everyone seemed ready to jump back into the fight, to stand up for the right of the people of BCA to their own planet.

But exactly _how_? They'd tried voicing their opinion to TEC, with horrible results. A stronger kind of action was needed; they much was clear. But it was difficult to think of anything they could do--demonstrations, boycotts, appeals to governments or intersystem law codes--that would make any difference to the corporation.

"Feuilly's friend is right," Jehan said. "The only thing that will affect TEC is reducing their profits. They don't care what anyone on BCA thinks of them, as long as it's not going to disrupt their production."

"So we disrupt it," Bahorel said. "We break into the hangars overnight and disable the equiment, so they can't operate. We leave anonymous notes--'Give us a free BCA, or we go for the refinery plant next.' Or-- _or_ , if we got enough people involved, could we convince the TEC workers to go on strike? Nobody works, no ore gets mined-- _that_ would get their attention."

But Enjolras shook his head. "It's too dangerous. TEC's obviously not afraid to do whatever it takes to silence people, and as far as we can tell, nobody in authority cares; the Colonial Authority certainly hasn't done anything. If TEC can get away with murder--ten murders--and torture, then nobody on the planet is really safe from them. I don't know if it's worth it, if it means putting citizens in danger."

"They can't kill us all," Bahorel said. "If we--"

Musichetta interrupted him. "Actually, I think they maybe could. Not the whole planet, maybe, but the number of people we're likely to convince to commit to something like that? It's quite possible they really could kill everyone involved--and get away with it. Enjolras has a point. Nobody on BCA is going to stop them, and nobody outside BCA would even know about it."

"It's the same problem we've had since the beginning," Feuilly said. "We're so cut off from the rest of the system. If people on the inner planets--the old, fully developed places where the rich people live--if they knew what was going on on BCA, I'm sure they'd care . . . wouldn't they? There are laws against this kind of thing. Somebody must have cared enough to make the laws; surely there's still someone who enforces them."

"There are intersystem news sites," Jehan said. "They post news about scandals and corruption all the time--that is, the times I've gone on the internet, the news sites are always full of this kind of thing. I think people _would_ care, if they knew."

"So can we send them our story?" Bahorel asked. "We can sacrifice another phone."

"They wouldn't believe it if we just told them," Jehan said. "I'm sure they get hundreds of fake stories every day. We'd need proof--photos or something. Something striking. And we--"

 _And we didn't take photos of Joly,_ Feuilly thought. Courfeyrac looked down at the table, pushing nothing around on his empty plate with his fork. Marius opened his mouth and then shut it.

After a few minutes, Musichetta broke the silence. "Well, what about the refining plant?" she suggested. "From what Feuilly said, TEC's illegally putting its workers in danger there. Could we get people on the news sites angry about that?"

"They're definitely breaking laws," Feuilly said. "My coworker said so--or at least, they're bending laws so far they might as well be breaking them. It's probably not enough to get them in legal trouble, but do you think people would get angry over it?"

"They definitely would," Courfeyrac said.

"It would be a scandal," Jehan mused. "People like to see big corporations go down, don't they?"

Musichetta shrugged. "Normal people like to see powerful people made small. Who knows what powerful people like?"

"We could send them a picture of the protective gear that we're supposed to wear," Feuilly suggested. "It just sits in lockers, and most of it is torn or malfunctioning. I don't know where it is, but I'm sure I could find it. Or I can ask Combeferre where it's stored."

Enjolras was grinning around the group, his eyes alight with excitement. Then, out of nowhere, his face fell. "It won't work," he said. "All the news sites are on public networks; the upload speed is impossible. Even at the lowest resolution, the phone would die before we could get one picture uploaded." He frowned, thinking. "If we were sending the photos on a private connection, we could get in a dozen before the phone died--but that's no good; we don't know anybody off-world."

"Would it make a difference if we did?" Ep asked. "You just said the news sites are too slow."

"Just for remote access, using"--Enjolras grimaced--"stolen phones. Somebody on one of the inner planets could plug in directly and upload as much as they wanted to any public network." He paused hopefully, but Ep said nothing. "Do you know somebody on one of the inner planets?"

Ep hesitated for a long time before nodding quickly. "Yeah."

"And you have a number to reach them?"

She nodded again. "She doesn't give a shit about BCA or freedom or anything," she said in a rush. "But if you offered her money, she'd upload whatever you wanted wherever you wanted it, she couldn't care."

"We can get her money," Enjolras said earnestly. "We can definitely get her that."

"A lot," Ep warned. "Like fifteen thousand."

Enjolras exchanged a glance with Jehan, who nodded. "Yes, we can do that. Can you ask her if she would do it?"

"It'd burn a phone," Ep said. "And I know she'll do whatever if we pay her. Maybe we should get the pictures ready first, and write down whatever you want to send to the news people, so everything's ready. Then I could contact her and we could send the stuff right away; do it all on one phone."

"Okay," Enjolras said. "We'll follow whatever plan you think is best." Ep just nodded, her mouth set in a thin line, but her cheeks flushed pink.

At the end of the meeting, Enjolras gave Feuilly his phone and showed him how to use it to take photos and send them to Jehan.

“This just uses the planet's network, so you can send as many photos as you like. So if you see something else besides the suits--if there’s an obvious safety hazard or something, you can take pictures of that, too. Just be careful. I don’t want you getting into trouble over this.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” Feuilly said. “I’ll make sure nobody sees me taking the pictures.”

“Good.” Enjolras hesitated, shoving his hands deep in his pockets, then added, “And if something were to go wrong and you--well, if you get into any kind of trouble--don’t let them take the phone away from you. If you keep it on you, we can track the signal and that way we’ll know where you are if--just, if anything should happen.”

Feuilly’s palms were suddenly sweaty and he had to resist the urge to wipe them on his jumpsuit. This hadn’t seemed dangerous until Enjolras started suggesting worst-case scenarios. “All right,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”

“But be safe--okay?”

“I will,” Feuilly promised. Forcing a smile to hide his unease, he turned his attention to the story Bahorel was telling, which seemed to have a dreamlike illogicalness to it but which had Grantaire doubled over with laughter. It would all be fine, he told himself.

  
  


The next day, when he slipped away on the midday break to look for the safety gear, he felt a little silly at his nervousness the night before. Combeferre didn’t even ask for an explanation when Feuilly asked him where the lockers were, although Feuilly volunteered the reason he’d prepared anyway: He was studying them for a friend who was experimenting with building his own safety equipment. (It wasn’t even a lie, exactly; Bahorel had been speculating about whether he could cobble together some kind of homemade protective gear for Feuilly, in case of another accident.)

The lockers, it turned out, were in a room off the main hallway that he walked past every single day on his way to the bathroom or to step outside for some cooler air. If anyone even noticed him leaving the break room, they wouldn’t think anything of it. Feuilly took his time strolling slowly down the main hallway, waiting for the two workers ahead of him to turn aside into the restroom, before glancing quickly around--nobody was in the hallway, in either direction--and slipping into the storage room.

His key had a number stamped into the metal, faded and difficult to read. The first locker he tried, it didn’t fit the lock, and for a moment he was afraid something had gone wrong in some major way he didn’t even understand, before he realized that what he’d thought was a 6 was actually an 8, and his actual locker was two over. On locker 2038, the key fit perfectly, and with a little bit of jiggling, he had the locker open.

There was no protective suit inside, which was a bit of a disappointment, but there was a respirator and a plastic set of goggles. Both were ancient. The goggles were so scratched up that they weren’t really transparent anymore, and the elastic band meant to hold them on the head was dry-rotted and useless. The respirator, meanwhile, was missing one of its two filters; a large, circular hole gaped on that side of the mask. Feuilly took pictures of the half-empty locker and its meager equipment, then pulled out the mask and goggles and took pictures of them individually. He tried to put them on together and take a picture of how they looked on a person, but his arms were too short and the angle too awkward, and he kept ending up with half his head cut off, just one eye of the goggles and the hole in the mask visible in the frame of the photo.

On a whim, he tried one of the other lockers--and found it wasn’t even locked. There was nothing in it, so he tried others in hopes of finding an example of the jumpsuit to photograph. He ended up with a set of five or six open lockers along one wall, all with various assortments of ragged gear, and took another set of photos of all of them together, thinking maybe the array of bad equipment might make more of an impact. One of the lockers held a tattered jumpsuit, so he took it out and spread it out on the floor so the dammage would be easier to see. The suit was riddled with holes, their edges slick and melted, and Feuilly shivered, wondering what kind of accident could have burnt those holes in it--and what had happened to the person inside the suit.

The end-of-break bell sounded, making Feuilly jump. Quickly, he snapped a few final pictures, then stuffed the suit back into its locker and closed and latched the other open lockers. Then he turned to the phone and sent the photos to Jehan, holding his breath as the little sending icon pulsed and pulsed. The sound of tramping boots came from the hallway outside as the workers flooded down the hallway to the main plant floor.

The icon turned red.

Hands sweating, Feuilly hit send again. He tried to run through in his head the things Enjolras had said could cause the message to fail to send--bad signal was one, he thought. There were others, but he couldn't remember them. The noise from the hallway dropped off to a few sets of hurrying feet. He needed to get back _now_. The icon still pulsed deliberately, working on sending the message.

Finally, the icon flashed one last time and changed to the green check which meant everything had gone through. Feuilly shoved the phone in his pocket and tore out into the hallway. Too late, he remembered to wonder whether anyone was coming--but fortunately, the hall was clear in both directions. Trying to look properly concerned about being late without looking suspicious, Feuilly hurried down the hallway and arrived on the main plant floor in time to grab a load of ore and slip into line just before one of the supervisors turned and strode toward the hallway doors to check for stragglers.

Trying not to pant with relief, Feuilly didn't realize it was Combeferre in front of him until the man glanced back at him and asked, "Did you find them?"

“I did, thanks,” Feuilly said.

The line reached the foot of the tower and slowed down, so they were shuffling along one step at a time, with long pauses in between; it always took a while for things to get back into an efficient rhythm right after the midday break. Combeferre took advantage of the slower pace to half turn his body to be able to look at Feuilly while he spoke. “Anything useful?”

“They’re all in pretty bad shape,” Feuilly said. “You were right, there’d be no point in actually wearing any of what’s in my locker. But I might have a few ideas for my friend.”

"What kinds of materials does he have?" Combeferre asked.

"A lot of old machinery parts, and some synthetic rubber door seals from abandoned prefab buildings," Feuilly invented. The line had slowed almost to a standstill now, and he shifted the weight of the load on his shoulders. "He also has some chemicals that he was thinking about using for air purification, but I don't know a lot about that stuff, so I couldn't tell you exactly what he has."

"Hmm. For carbon monoxide, he'd need something that the molecules will react readily with--I'm not sure what's available in stores or salvage shops that would work. Do you know if he--"

Combeferre was cut off by a long groan that seemed to come from every direction, almost too deep to hear. Feuilly looked around for the source of the noise. The walkway underfoot shuddered as a hundred workers, along with their loads of ore, shifted uneasily.

People on the ground were shouting, but Feuilly couldn't make out the words. Combeferre turned around all the way, craning his neck to see what was going on below. The person behind Feuilly stumbled, jostling him, as the ramp shook again.

Then--with a ear-splitting wail--the walkway dropped a foot.

Combeferre's eyes widened. _"Get off of here!"_

Feuilly spun around; there was nowhere to go, the ramp was packed with workers. Everyone seemed to realize at the same time what was happening, and they started to flee downward, pushing and shouting as the ramp started to tilt wildly. Feuilly staggered downward, clinging to the rickety railing to keep from falling to the concrete floor two stories below. The scream of metal bending and tearing apart filled his ears.

Then there was solid ground beneath him and he was running, unsure where he was going but instinctively trying to get away. The high keening of the collapsing ramp swelled, became an inhuman shriek. Feuilly turned around just in time to see the bottom half of the ramp--still full of people struggling to get down--crash to the plant floor.

For a moment, all he could do was stare at the sickening tangle of metal and bodies. Then, even as he started to run toward the wreckage, to see what he could do to help, he remembered the phone in his jumpsuit pocket.

The scene in front of him was horrible proof of the way TEC bypassed even the most basic safety measures for the sake of its profit. It would certainly catch a lot of attention in the intersystem news; it might even be the evidence they needed to take down TEC.

But every eye in the plant was turned toward the tower. There was no way he could take the picture without someone seeing him. Would the bosses care, or would they be too distracted with addressing the accident? Would they guess why he was taking pictures, and would their loyalty to TEC be strong enough that they'd report him?

Did it matter?

He pulled the phone from his pocket. Around him, everyone was shouting and screaming and running in every direction; Feuilly braced himself with feet planted wide and started taking pictures. He caught the twisted panels of metal and the snapped limbs and the blood. He caught the upper part of the ramp dangling in midair, stranded workers clinging to the thin railings. He caught the stricken, shocked expression on the face of a woman staggering away from the collapse. He caught the moment when a falling load of ore knocked three people from the upper ramp.

"Hey!" someone shouted. "What are you doing with that phone?"

Feuilly turned to see one of the bosses looking at him. He stepped backward, trying to lose himself in the roil of panicked workers, but the man was moving toward him. Quickly, Feuilly pulled up the message app, found Jehan's name, attached the photos. His fingers were shaking so badly he could barely hit send.

A hand gripped his shoulder. "What are you doing?" the man said again. "Are you--who are you sending those to?"

The icon flashed--and flashed--and then, green. Feuilly breathed a sigh of relief. The supervisor's hand closed painfully on his arm. "You're coming with me."

Feuilly wrenched away and ducked into the crowd, his breath coming fast. The supervisor's shouts pursued him, calling someone to head him off. The mass of people that had seemed impossibly dense a few moments ago now seemed far too thin, and everyone was moving slowly, as if in low gravity, so Feuilly's frantic scrambling marked him as fugitive. There was nowhere to disappear to, no way to hide in the crowd.

 _Don’t let them take the phone away from you,_ Enjolras had said. _If you keep it on you, we can track the signal and that way we’ll know where you are._ Feuilly's stomach dropped as if he'd been kicked in the gut, as he realized what that meant: If Enjolras could track the signal of his phone, surely TEC could track the phone he'd sent the pictures to. They could find Jehan--and everyone--through him.

There were relatively few people between him and one of the side doors; he might be able to make it through--but he'd be more likely to be seen, going that way--and he still had the phone on him. He swerved the other way, back toward the furnace, darting between survivors stumbling away from the wreckage and people rushing in to help.

"Stop that man!" the head boss shouted. Behind Feuilly, one of the bosses tried to tackle him and barely missed, his fingers brushing the back of Feuilly's clothes. Just a few more feet.

Feuilly scrambled under a jutting length of walkway and up to the furnace, on the side where the molten iron ran out. Doubled over around the cramp in his side, he took the half-flight of stairs to the deck three at a time. Someone pounded up the stairs behind him, but it was too late--just as he grabbed Feuilly's arm and threw him to the ground, the phone slipped from Feuilly's fingers into the tray of molds. It floated on the surface of the molten iron for a moment before sinking in a cloud of foul black smoke.

As the boss shoved his face down into the concrete of the deck floor, Feuilly found himself smiling.

  
  


Just because the phone had been destroyed, of course, didn't mean TEC would give up on finding out what Feuilly had been doing with it. It started in the cluttered little office where the bosses had dragged Feuilly after they'd caught him; when Feuilly said he hadn't sent photos to anyone, the head boss left him there, taped to a chair, while she went back to deal with the chaos collapsed ramp.

To Feuilly's surprise, four guards with guns arrived almost before the first emergency medics. They marched Feuilly quickly through the plant and out to a TEC transport van, shoving him into the back, piling in behind him and slamming the doors. The ride through the city was fast, and Feuilly quickly lost track of the turns, not used to thinking through them so quickly. Not that it mattered--knowing where he was being taken wasn't likely to make any difference.

When they brought him out again, it was in an underground parking garage; that narrowed it down a lot, since there were only a handful of buildings in the city with garages like this. All but one belonged to TEC, but that was hardly new information, since it was obvious that TEC were the ones taking charge of Feuilly.

And again: It didn't really matter.

It was in this building, in a bare, gray-walled room somewhere in the basement level, that TEC's people asked Feuilly the questions a second time: _Why were you taking pictures of the accident? Who did you send them to? What were they going to do with them? Who are you working with?_

Feuilly, taped to a chair again, answered the same way as before, explaining that he'd taken the pictures on a whim, because the ramp collapse was huge and scary and striking. And he had a new phone with a camera that he'd just started to learn to use. He didn't send the pictures to anybody. He ran because he panicked when the supervisor started yelling at him; he was afraid of getting fined or having his phone taken from him. There was no plan, and he wasn't working with anybody. He didn't send the pictures to anyone.

The people asking the questions exchanged looks with each other, and Feuilly could tell they didn't find those answers acceptable. Some people left; others stayed, watching Feuilly with narrowed eyes while he counted to fifty and back down again inside his head, in an attempt to still his frantic thoughts. After a while, some new people came in.

They started asking the questions again, but now in different ways.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo friends this chapter has extended depictions of torture/violence in it please be warned.

Feuilly lost track of the time after a while. It felt like hours and hours must have passed, maybe days, but without sleeping or eating to mark the time, he couldn't be sure. Maybe it was only a few minutes. Maybe he'd blacked out for longer than the few seconds it felt like, and he'd been in this basement room for weeks. It was hard to figure out. Every time he tried to focus on it, another blow knocked his concentration askew.

Their method of questioning was horribly, brutally simple. The person interrogating him (it changed from time to time when they got tired or bored--Feuilly's only sure clue that time was passing) asked a question. Feuilly bit his lip and said nothing. The person asked again, louder. Feuilly closed his eyes and braced himself. The questioner hit him--with a fist, with a heavy plastic pipe, with a wrench. Not hard enough to do serious damage, at least not immediately, but hard enough to hurt, hard enough to jar his thoughts in his head and nudge the seed of panic growing inside his chest. Then cycle began again. Over and over, for hours and hours and hours.

He tried at first to block out the pain by thinking about something else, a good memory he could escape into. He thought about his parents, about the soft, dusty smell of his father, the way he was always warm even when the mining equipment shut down for the night and the temperature under the dome dropped. About his mother singing the songs her grandmother had taught her, old songs from back before the family had come to Gideon. About falling asleep as a toddler, curled up next to his mother, feeling completely and totally safe in a way he'd never felt again in his life. About the game they used to play over dinner, when his mother would--

_"Who did you send the pictures to?"_

More recent moments were more vivid, if less completely rosy in his memory. He thought hard about visiting Bahorel and Musichetta out on the farm, one Cycle Day last year, walking out to the edge of town the evening before, sleeping crowded together on the floor of the little shack, waking up in the morning to fresh fruit grown right there on BCA for breakfast. Courfeyrac had nearly dissolved with affection for the wobbly little baby of the woolly animals Bahorel called "shoats" (somewhere halfway between the sheep and goats you saw sometimes in films from New Terra); Musichetta had, in a rare fit of optimism, promised them all mittens for winter because she was _certain_ they would soon work out a way to spin the short fibers of the animals' wool into yarn. They had carried a picnic out to the hills behind the farm and laid down with the warm wind blowing the tall grass around over their heads, and the air had smelled truly clean for the first time in Feuilly's life, and they'd laughed and ate and told stories until the sun was low in the sky, and Enjolras had--

_"Who are you working with?"_

He thought about the cold last winter, a fierce, biting cold like nothing he'd ever felt before. The cold ate into your bones until "warm" was just a word that refered to something you'd heard of but couldn't remember at all. The wind was everywhere--only the newest TEC offices had solid enough seams to keep it out--and he would roll his blankets tight around himself in bed to try to block it out enough of the drafts so he could sleep. In the morning, his head would ache from the relentless cold and there would be snow in the folds of his blanket. The sky would be black as he walked to work and the wind just sliced through his clothes and flesh like he was nothing. It was the purest, most intense feeling Feuilly had ever experienced, an unforgettable ache of ice that he could never forget; it lingered deep inside, so that even in the middle of summer--

_"What is your plan?"_

He was. So thirsty. He couldn't remember the last time he'd drunk anything. His tongue felt swollen and impossible in his mouth; his teeth were sticky with blood. He clenched his jaw until it ached, certain that if he opened his mouth to ask for water, he'd accidentally tell them everything.

_"Why were you taking pictures?"_

Some time later, after the woman had left and been replaced by another man, Feuilly was lying on the floor. They were kicking him, almost listlessly, in between questions, and he had his arms up around his face, but it left his stomach exposed; he was doubled up around his aching ribs, but it wasn't enough. The concrete under his cheek was wet. His vision tilted and blurred when he opened his eyes, and his ears rang so loudly he almost didn't hear the small word fall from his lips.

"Jehan."

Instantly, they were crowding over him, and he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to take the moment back. Maybe they hadn't heard--maybe his tongue was so swollen it had just come out as gibberish--maybe if he could just--

"Jehan? Who is Jehan?"

Feuilly tried to bite back the words, but his lips were cracked and stinging and he was so, so afraid the man was going to start kicking him again, and he--

"The photos," he gasped. "I sent them to Jehan."

"What's Jehan's last name?"

"I don't know--please--it's Jehan, just Jehan." He was sick and trembling, begging, tensed against a kick that hadn't come yet, but it was only a matter of time.

"Where do they live?"

"Please, I don't know that either; I only met him in public places, at the cafeteria on the corner by--by the old shoe warehouse. Please, don't--"

"What was he going to do with the photos?"

"I don't know." Without warning, the boot smashed into his ribs again. " _Ow_ \--please--I--" Another kick, this time to his unprotected head. Maybe he would black out before he could ruin anything else--maybe the pain would make him crazy and he wouldn't--

"He was going to send them--please, no--he was sending them to news sites," he found himself crying. "Please, don't, I can't--"

"Which sites?"

"On the inner planets, I don't know the names, I've never seen the internet, I don't know anything about it. Please, I just took the photos, I don't know anything else."

"When?"

"Right away, I think." His mouth was full of blood; he spat onto the floor. "I--I swear, that's all I know. Please, he just asked me to take photos, he--he gave me the phone, he paid me--I don't know anything about it--"

There was a moment of quiet, the people muttering over Feuilly's head as he cringed on the floor, waiting for another kick. Then footsteps, the door opening and closing.

And then nothing. When Feuilly opened his eyes, the room was empty. He sobbed with relief.

He pushed himself up off the ground, his arms trembling. The room spun and he couldn't figure out how to get his feet under him, so he crawled. Blood dripped to the floor as he dragged himself across the room, pausing every few minutes to catch his breath. He could barely see out of one eye, and it hurt to breathe. But he made it to the corner farthest from the door and curled up there, pressing himself into the angle between the two walls, wrapping his arms around himself and trying to force down the terror that shook his whole body.

  
  


He must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to someone hitting him. They grabbed him by the arm and dragged him from his corner, and he heard himself cry out. Everything hurt and he didn't understand what was going on; all he knew was he was scared.

The noise above him resolved itself into an angry voice: "There is no Jehan! You lied to us!"

"There is, there is," Feuilly pleaded. "I didn't lie!"

"You lied," the voice said again. Something solid crashed into Feuilly's temple and his vision flashed white.

"No, please!" he cried, bringing his arms up around his head. "His name is Jehan, I swear."

 _"Who did you send the pictures to?"_ They hit him without waiting for an answer this time, and his ears rang and everything hurt and he didn't know how to make it stop.

Slowly, the ringing in his ears faded, and he found he was crying, pleading, "Jehan, Jehan, Jehan . . ."

"Who did you send the pictures to?"

"Please, please, don't--" The pipe caught his uplifted arm, and there was a crack. Fire shot up to his shoulder, and he screamed.

"Who did you send the pictures to?"

The next blow knocked him back into blackness.

  
  


Later on, he was awake, and they were beating him. He'd forgotten about words and could only cry, but maybe it didn't matter. They didn't seem to be asking questions anymore.

All of a sudden, the lights went out. For a moment, Feuilly thought--illogically--that he'd passed out again, but everything still hurt. So it was something else.

After a moment there were panicked voices in the darkness overhead. He heard the rustling as the people in the room hurried to the door; one of them kicked him as they passed, but it was glancing blow that might have been unintentional.

It hardly mattered that they were gone. Feuilly's ribs still ached and his legs ached and his head ached and his arm screamed with pain. He lay as still as possible on the wet concrete floor, trying not to move, trying not even to breathe. He tried to slip into unconsciousness and couldn't, so he let everything go fuzzy and waited for whatever would happen next.

Some time later--maybe only minutes--there was a light shining in his half-closed eyes, low voices talking urgently over his head. Feuilly sensed someone crouch down next to him, and he heard himself whimper, knowing what was coming next.

"Feuilly, can you hear me?" someone was saying. "Feuilly, please." It took Feuilly a minute to place the voice as one he knew, to realize that this was a question he _should_ answer.

"Enj . . ." he muttered, his clumsy tongue stumbling over the rest of the name. Why was Enjolras here? It didn't make sense. But now he was having trouble remembering where "here" was; maybe Feuilly was the one in the wrong place.

"Oh thank god," Enjolras breathed. He touched Feuilly's cheek so gently his fingers were barely there.

The light skated wildly over his face and away. Its crazy motion made him dizzy, and he shut his eyes. Someone touched his arm, the brush of fingers sending flickers of fire toward his shoulder, and he bit back a whimper.

"The bastards," a voice hissed--Bahorel, maybe.

"I was--I--" Feuilly didn't know what he had wanted to say. He thought distantly that maybe he was crying.

"Okay, shhh, it's okay," Enjolras was saying. "C'mon, we're getting you out of here. Can you stand up if we help you?"

"Think so," Feuilly mumbled. They hauled him to his feet, and Bahorel slung his arm across his shoulders before Feuilly's knees gave way; Enjolras picked up the light and slipped in under his other arm. Feuilly swayed there between them for a minute, eyes closed, waiting for the fresh wave of pain to fade away.

"Okay there?" Bahorel asked, and Feuilly managed a vague noise of assent.

"Let's go; we don't have much time," Enjolras said.

It was pitch black out in the hallway too, but Enjolras and Bahorel moved like they knew where they were going. Feuilly just focused on getting his feet to move. Every time he stumbled, it was a jolt of pain through the arm slung over Enjolras's shoulders, but his feet were dumb blocks of wood and he couldn't see them anyway, and they were moving so quickly. Everything got a little bit fuzzy, and then he snapped back to find that he had let his head fall to rest on Bahorel's shoulder, and that they'd stopped moving forward.

"All right, we have to go up a flight of stairs now," Enjolras was saying. "Still okay, Feuilly?"

"Yeah," he gasped. They moved on, and he hardly had to climb the steps, because Enjolras and Bahorel were lifting him, but even staying upright was a challenge. He was shaking all over, shivering like it was the middle of winter, but that was wrong. He wasn't cold; his skin was damp with sweat. Why was he shivering?

"Last one," Enjolras said, and then they were on level ground again, and they wanted to move faster, but Feuilly was stumbling more and more often, and he couldn't completely choke back the whine of pain welling up in his throat.

"Okay, hang on," Bahorel said. "Let's rearrange." They stopped and Feuilly let his eyes fall closed, sagging between his two supports. Bahorel bent and scooped him up under his knees, lifting him against his chest. "Better?" Feuilly mumbled something, he didn't know what.

The lights flickered on, and Bahorel swore under his breath. "Almost there," Enjolras said, striding past Bahorel. "Come on, quick!" But there was a noise behind them, and Bahorel started to run, Feuilly's head bouncing painfully against his shoulder with every footfall, and everything went dark again.

 

* * *

 

Feuilly spent the very earliest days of his life asleep against his father's chest. His father tied him there with long strips of cloth, his arms and legs bound securely out of the way of machinery and loose rocks, and he carried him around like that through all his work in the mining center, loads of stone on his back and his newborn son on his front. Feuilly was rocked by the movement of his father bending and straightening in his work; he breathed along with the rise and fall of his father's panting breaths of the thin Gideon air, and slept to the sound of his father's heartbeat in his ears. From the day after he was born until he was nearly two years old, that was his life.

As he got older and worked in the mining center himself, Feuilly watched many other babies grow up the same way, carried by their parents through the work day, watching the world with big eyes from underneath a tattered cloth wrap. It was awkward, dangerous for both the child and the encumbered parent--but on Gideon, where most of the population teetered on the edge of starvation, working wasn't a choice, and what else could you do with your baby while you worked?

There was something about the closeness of it--a little hand reaching up between wraps of cloth to tug on a beard, a mother cooing a story to the baby at her chest while she picked through chunks of stone--that sometimes made Feuilly's throat ache with a kind of longing he hadn't yet learned to quiet. On their brief breaks, the parents would loosen the wraps and let the children stretch their arms and legs in safety, and the babies would break into huge smiles on seeing their parents' faces, pumping their arms in excitement, babbling and laughing, and the tired lines of the parent's face would shift into a smile under the dust. Sometimes Feuilly would overhear a father singing to a child as he worked, the sound just audible in snatches above the shuddering roar of the machinery.

Of course, Feuilly didn't actually remember anything from that time. He knew he'd been carried like this by his father for months, not because he had any memories from such an early age, but simply because it was what everyone on Gideon did, and because his mother wouldn't have been able to carry a baby in her role as an exterior repair worker. Sometimes, as a teenager, he would imagine he heard a deep throbbing sound when he was just on the edge of sleep, a steady rhythm he could almost convince himself was the echo of the heartbeat he'd heard when he slept as an infant. But that was a fantasy, not a true memory. Feuilly's real memories didn't stretch quite far back enough for him to remember being carried by his father in his work.

Instead, Feuilly's earliest clear memory was the day his father left.

His father had come home in the middle of the day--a time when he wasn't supposed to be home, when he was never home. Feuilly was still a very little boy then, not quite three years old, but he was too big to carry, which on Gideon meant he was big enough to be left at home alone while his parents worked. When his father came in, Feuilly was lying on his back on the cot his family slept on, playing listlessly with a scrap of plastic. There had been no food that morning, or the day before, and he was so tired; the toy kept slipping out of his hands.

Feuilly's father appeared in the doorway, out of breath, swaying slightly, his helmet hanging from one hand. He stood still for a moment, staring at his son. Then, almost like falling, he had crossed the room and was on his knees on the cot, clutching Feuilly to him, hugging his child so tightly his arms trembled with the strain.

Probably he said something, but the words didn't stick in Feuilly's memory. All Feuilly would remember, years later, was the smell of his father's work clothes (sweat and rock dust and oil), the heat of his body, the rough feel of the fabric against his face, the crush of his arms as he held Feuilly to him.

Then he was gone, and Feuilly was left sitting on cot, bewildered by the strangeness of the whole thing. His father appearing at their home in the middle of the day. His father leaving behind his mining helmet--he always took his helmet to work, didn't he need it?

But when his mother came home that evening and saw the helmet sitting on the cot next to Feuilly, she sat down in the middle of the floor and sobbed. Feuilly's bewilderment turned to fear--a fear that only deepened when they went to the colony storeroom and brought home a whole stack of protein cakes, more than he could count. It was so strange to see so much food, when they were used to splitting half a cake between the three of them each day, that Feuilly burst into frightened tears.

It wasn't until years later--after Feuilly had watched other adults leave Gideon on slip ships, the families they left behind suddenly able to eat enough for a few months, or even years, and had finally put the pieces of the pattern together--that he understood what his father had sacrificed for the sake of his family. But at the time, Feuilly knew only that his father was gone, and when he asked where he had gone, people only looked sad or angry. He learned to stop asking long before he was old enough to get any answers.

 

* * *

 

He woke up once, briefly, in Bahorel's arms somewhere outside in the city. It was night, and the air was almost cool, and he caught a glimpse of streetlamps, orange and blurry and beautiful, before he faded back out again.

Then he was inside somewhere, a small space with too many people, too warm and god _what_ were they doing to his arm; he tried to pull away, to plead with them to stop, that he didn't know anything more, but he was unconscious again before he could do more than cry out.

Then there was nothing for a long time.

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only warnings for this chapter are aftermath/recovery from violence and talking about people who died in previous chapters. Enjoy. <3

The next time Feuilly woke up, it was the middle of the day. He was lying in someone's bed, and if he didn't move, he could almost convince himself that nothing hurt. He thought maybe it would be okay to stay just like that forever, staring up at the ceiling through the slits of his swollen eyelids, and never move.

"Feuilly?" Something rustled beside him, and Bossuet was leaning over the bed. "Hey," he said softly, a slow smile breaking across his face, and Feuilly thought with surprise that it was first time he'd really seen him smile in weeks. "Good morning. How're you feeling?"

He didn't know how to answer that--he wasn't even entirely convinced yet that this was really happening. Bossuet didn't seem bothered by his silence, though; he just kept on talking, his voice gentle and reassuring.

"You're on pain meds that Jehan snuck out of the clinic, so don't be worried if you feel a little fuzzy." He patted Feuilly's hand. "I don't know how much you remember of the trip over here, but you're at the farm. It was the safest place we could think of to bring you--as far away from TEC as possible. Everyone else is at work now, but I have instructions from Combeferre to get you to drink something and not let you get out of bed. He'll be back to check on you tonight, and we'll have you feeling better soon, okay?"

"Com . . . ferre?" Feuilly muttered, his tongue thick in his mouth.

"Your coworker from the refining plant?" Bossuet reminded him. "He's the reason we knew what happened to you. He saw them take you away, and I guess he knew that you knew Courfeyrac, because he came and found him and told him what was going on. He's also the one who set your arm last night; did you know he used to be a doctor? I guess probably you did; he's your friend, after all. It's lucky--without Joly, we didn't really have anyone who knew what to do."

He settled back in his seat, moving out of Feuilly's narrow field of vision. Feuilly gingerly turned his head to follow him and found it was all right. It hurt to move, but not as much as he'd expected.

"Do you want some water?" Bossuet suggested, reaching over Feuilly's head for a cup from the shelf behind him.

"Yes. No." Feuilly tried to lick his dry lips. "My mouth . . . blood."

"Want to rinse your mouth out first?" Bossuet guessed, and Feuilly nodded carefully. Bossuet brought a bowl from the next room and propped Feuilly up as he rinsed out his mouth again and again until the water ran clear and he felt a little less like a corpse. Then he refilled the cup and made Feuilly sip it slowly.

"How . . ." Feuilly asked in between swallows. "Enjolras and Bahorel . . . how'd they . . .?"

"There was a small explosion in the furnace room, which just so happened to come at the same time that the power lines to the building . . . malfunctioned, disabling most of the alarms and setting off others. Nobody really knew what was going on for a while." He grinned. "TEC shouldn't fuck with its own mechanics, is what I'm saying."

Feuilly blinked at him uncomprehendingly, his brain still foggy from the drugs. "I don't . . ."

"We cut the wires to the building and set off a bomb," Bossuet explained. He shrugged. "Maybe bomb is too strong a word. It made a loud noise and a lot of smoke. Bahorel and Grantaire came up with it."

"Everyone's okay?"

"Everyone's fine. Don't worry." Bossuet squeezed Feuilly's shoulders with the arm that was propping him up. "Everything went just as we'd planned it."

Already Feuilly was exhausted, and he could barely keep his eyes open--but he was absurdly terrified that if he closed his eyes this would all disappear and everything would be horrible again. Despite his best efforts, his head nodded, his teeth clacking against the rim of the cup.

"You look exhausted," Bossuet said, helping Feuilly lie back on the pillow. "I'll shut up so you can sleep again."

"No!" Feuilly reached out and caught the edge of Bossuet's sleeve with clumsy fingertips. "Stay . . . please? . . . And talk?"

"Sure," Bossuet said. He gently pulled his sleeve from Feuilly's grip and took his hand, settling back in his chair. "You're going to be okay, you know," he said. "You're safe now, everything's going to be all right. Just rest now and get better, and tomorrow, if you're feeling up to it, we can go outside and you can see the shoats. The babies have just learned how to head-butt, and they're always playing together and knocking each other over, and it's _adorable_."

Feuilly let his eyes fall closed. The pressure of Bossuet's fingers against his palm was a tether, tying him to the present, safe moment, and Bossuet's gentle voice went on in the background, telling him more about the farm. "And did you know that Bahorel has started trying to tame some of the local birds? He leaves food out for them, and they come every day. You might not get to see them tomorrow, because they usually come by really early, almost before the sun is up--but someday, we can . . ."

And Feuilly drifted off again.

  


It was dark the next time he woke up, and Enjolras and Courfeyrac were sitting next to the bed, talking in low murmurs. The moment Feuilly shifted, they broke off their conversation and turned toward him, listening.

"Feuilly?" Enjolras whispered.

"Enjolras." Feuilly's mouth was dry again, his lips cracking over the word. He wondered how long he'd been asleep.

"How are you feeling?" Enjolras's hand brushed Feuilly's forehead, his fingers cool against Feuilly's skin.

He felt exhausted, despite having just woken up. He was horribly thirsty. His head throbbed; his ribs hurt when he breathed; his arm hurt--everything hurt, really. He wasn't sure he had enough words to say it all.

"Thirsty," he muttered finally.

"I'll go get something, hang on." Enjolras pushed his chair back and left, and Courfeyrac leaned over the bed.

"Feuilly, oh my god," he said, his voice cracking. "That was. Oh my god." He reached for Feuilly's hand. "I'm so glad you're safe. I was so scared."

"Me too," Feuilly whispered, and Courfeyrac's eyes welled up with tears.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so, so sorry. We shouldn't have had you do that, it was too big a risk, and you were all alone; we should have--"

"My choice," Feuilly reminded him. He squeezed Courfeyrac's hand feebly. Courfeyrac sniffled and squeezed back.

Enjolras returned with water and soup and more pain meds, and he and Courfeyrac helped Feuilly sit up, propped up against Courfeyrac's chest. They wouldn't let him use his right arm, which was in a splint--Combeferre had decided it was fractured, they reported, and he should try not to move it at all--and Feuilly was too clumsy with his left, so Enjolras held the cup of water to his lips and then fed him the soup, one spoonful at a time.

"It worked," he told Feuilly in between bites. "We sent the photos and information to Ep's contact, and just this morning, the story appeared on the news sites. The internet is going crazy--we counted nearly forty different editorials about TEC on different sites and blogs before the phone went out this afternoon. It really worked. It wasn't for nothing, what you went through."

"That's good," Feuilly said, ignoring Courfeyrac's sharp intake of breath by his ear. It was hard to feel anything right now, between the insistent pain and the slow beginnings of numbness creeping in from the drugs, but he knew distantly that soon he would be really glad about the news. "That's good," he said again.

"Everyone seems really angry about it," Enjolras continued, giving him another spoonful. "I read one article where the author said the government should look into all the corporations, not just TEC, that it was time we stopped turning a blind eye to the corruption all across the galaxy. This might really make a difference--in more places than just here."

"I'm glad. That's . . . that's incredible." He was getting tired, and he leaned his head back against Courfeyrac's shoulder, closing his eyes. "Thank you for telling me," he murmured.

"Come on, Feuilly, how about three more spoonfuls?" Enjolras urged. "You haven't eaten anything in days."

"I'm so tired," Feuilly mumbled.

Even with his eyes closed, he could hear the worried frown in Enjolras's voice. "Combeferre said he really needed to eat. But I don't want . . ."

"What about an IV?" Courfeyrac suggested. "Maybe Jehan could steal one from the clinic."

At the name, Feuilly's eyes shot open. "Jehan," he choked out. He pushed himself up, ignoring the way the room tilted. "Enjolras, I told them--they know about Jehan."

Enjolras's voice was very quiet, careful. "What do they know?"

"I told them about Jehan--I said I sent the photos--and the plan, to send them to the news sites. Oh god, I told them everything." His head was swimming, his blood pounding in his ears. "I'm sorry," he babbled. "I couldn't help it--I gave everything away."

"Feuilly, calm down," Enjolras said softly. His hands were on Feuilly's shoulders. "It's okay. Whatever happened, it's okay."

A sob caught in Feuilly's throat. "I'm sorry," he said again.

"You don't have to be sorry," Courfeyrac said fiercely. "It's not your fault. The way they hurt you--anybody would have given in."

"It'll be all right," Enjolras repeated. "We'll take care of everything. Just--can you tell me exactly what you told them about our group? If any of us need to hide, we need to know."

"I told them about Jehan," Feuilly repeated brokenly. "Just his name--I didn't know where he lived. They weren't even happy with that; they came back and said I was lying. I don't think I told them about anybody else . . . I--I don't remember everything."

Impossibly, Enjolras's face broke into a smile. "Feuilly . . . Jehan is a nickname. They couldn't look him up, because he's in the system under his real name. It's actually--"

"No." Feuilly cut him off, covering one ear with his good hand. "Don't tell me it--I'm not--"

"We trust you," Enjolras said. "It's okay."

"No," Feuilly insisted. "Don't."

Enjolras let it drop. "They can't find Jehan," he said again. "Everyone's safe--because of you. The plan went through, and they don't know anything they shouldn't, and everyone's safe." He smiled, and a tightness Feuilly hadn't recognized in his face released. "It's incredible. _You_ are incredible."

The panic was draining away, leaving Feuilly's whole body as heavy as lead. He slumped back against Courfeyrac, letting his eyes fall closed.

"Jehan's safe?" he muttered.

"Jehan's safe," Enjolras assured him.

"Everything's okay," Courfeyrac told him. "Everything's fine." And his steady voice chased Feuilly back under.

  


For several days, Feuilly did little but sleep and eat and lie in the sun and sleep some more. Bossuet, since he was still unemployed, stayed at the farmhouse with him, showing great dedication to his charge from Combeferre to constantly nag Feuilly to drink fluids and rest.

As Feuilly's bruises darkened to blue and black and his energy returned, he limped out into the fields around the cottage, and Bossuet showed Feuilly the project he'd been helping out with since he'd been fired. Something called "grafting," it appeared to involve tying pieces of some trees to other trees; Feuilly didn't understand what the point of it was (trees were trees, weren't they?), but Bossuet seemed to be thrilled about the few twigs that had put out leaves, and it was good to see him excited about something.

In the evenings, their friends came in from the city--not everyone, not every night, since the farm was a long walk from the center city, and there was a lot to do, spreading the news and articles they'd pulled from the internet around the city. Just knowing that someone out there was paying attention to them, that people on other planets cared what was happening on BCA, was really encouraging, Enjolras reported, and it gave some perspective. People were starting to believe that TEC wasn't the unassailable giant it appeared after all. They were talking about fighting back, about protests or walkouts or filing appeals; a hundred different conversations going on in cafeterias and housing units and 24-hour-clinics all over the city. Graffiti was going up faster than TEC could paint it over, the same phrase Courfeyrac had used at the spontaneous protest and Feuilly had seen on the wall of Plant D: _I believe in BCA._

About six days after Feuilly's photos had been sent to the news sites, Beta Caeli A's connection to the intersystem network was taken down. The official story the Colonial Authority gave was that some kind of local animal had made a nest in one of the conduits that connected the city to the network tower and chewed through the fiber-optic cables, but Combeferre scoffed at it, pointing out that the local fauna rarely got above shoulder height, and none of them could chew through a cable nearly ten feet in diameter.

"Either the Colonial Authority is working with TEC--which they already are on the self-administration issue, so it wouldn't be surprising--or TEC sabotaged them and they're too embarassed to admit it," he concluded. "Regardless, we're in the dark until they get it back up--so we have to keep our own fire burning here."

The Friends of BCA started working twice as hard to keep the momentum toward revolt building, even without the news from the rest of the galaxy. Their visits grew rarer and more rushed, as they were needed in the city most evenings, organizing meetings and planning strategies for different events and making contact with the other resistance groups that were springing up all over the city. Feuilly, spending his days shuffling between his bed and a lounge chair outside, started to feel incredibly useless and lazy.

He said as much to Courfeyrac one evening. Courfeyrac had arrived late in the afternoon, bringing copies of the colorful pamphlets--all written in pictographs--that a bonded workers' collective group had put out, and stories of the rally the night before that had packed the largest cafeteria in the northeast district to standing room only. All Feuilly had to offer was the news that he'd weeded one of the garden plots for a quarter of an hour before Bossuet caught him at it and sent him inside with a scolding and orders to take a nap. And though Courfeyrac laughed at the story, and said how good it was to hear that Feuilly was well enough to be back to his old hardworking self, Feuilly still felt pathetic when compared to everything his friends were accomplishing in St. Denis.

"I wish I could be down in the city, working with all of you," he muttered later that night, as they sat on the bed listening to the chirp of insects in the fields outside. "Instead I'm sitting up here, useless."

Courfeyrac looked up in surprise from the flower he was doodling on the windowframe. "You've already done more than enough," he said. "Nobody could say you haven't done your part--and more--for the cause."

"I hardly did anything--I took a few pictures," Feuilly said. "There's still so much to do, and I'm stuck up here where nothing's happening."

"I, for one, am _really_ glad to know you're up here--and safe," Courfeyrac said seriously, meeting Feuilly's eyes. "I mean it. I was so scared when you got caught."

He turned back to the windowsill, his pen scratching over the plastic. "I was really scared when Joly was caught. And afterward, too," he admitted. "I knew it was what they wanted--to scare us so bad we wouldn't fight them anymore--but I couldn't stop thinking that next time it could be me. I don't know how you went through with it, knowing what was coming. I don't know if I could be that brave."

Feuilly felt his cheeks grow hot. "I don't think I was being brave," he said quietly. "I wasn't thinking, at the time, about how--how much it would hurt. I just knew we needed the pictures."

He thought about the brief dialog he'd had with himself--just a few days ago, but though it felt like months--standing there in the plant, with the collapsing tower above him, clutching the smooth plastic casing of the phone in his pocket; he remembered quickly weighing the outcomes, making a decision almost before he'd thought about it.

"And I guess," he added, "I figured, well, if somebody was going to get killed to get us what we needed to take down TEC, it might as well be me--better me than somebody who really matters. It made sense."

He looked up to find Courfeyrac staring at him, stricken. "That's what you were thinking?" he whispered. "That you dying . . . wouldn't really matter?"

"I'm not really attached to anyone," Feuilly explained, "so there's nobody depending on me. I'd leave the smallest hole behind." It seemed so logical--it had almost been an unconscious conclusion, at the time. The photos were important; he wasn't. So there it was.

To Feuilly's surprise, Courfeyrac's face crumpled and he started to cry. "How can you--why would you think that--" He shut his eyes and breathed in through his nose, clenching his hands in the blankets. "Do you really think that? That you don't matter to any of us? To me?"

"Well, no--but not--" Feuilly stopped, taken aback at the fierceness in Courfeyrac's voice. "Courfeyrac . . . are you mad at me?"

"Yes!" Courfeyrac sobbed. "No--I don't know, maybe I'm mad at myself. I just--I care about you _so much_ and I've tried so, so hard to show you, and if you don't understand that, that means either I fucked up, or you don't care enough to pay attention--and either way, it really--sorry--" Courfeyrac broke off midsentence and pushed himself off the bed, yanking open the door.

Halfway out of the room, he stopped and turned back. "I don't care, I'm going to say it," he snapped. "If you had just _thought_ \--if you had just thought about it for _ten secconds,_ or--or paid any attention to the people around you, you would have seen how important you are to all of us, and when you--okay, it _was_ brave and self-sacrificing and all of that, what you did, I'm not saying it wasn't. But it was also a stupid, unncessary risk!"

Feuilly sat frozen on the bed, his hands shaking. Courfeyrac was almost shouting, stumbling over sobs but rushing though anyway. "And if you didn't even _think_ about what losing you would do to everybody who loves you--I mean, you saw us with Joly; you _knew_ what that was like. I just--I don't understand. How could you not _see_? Don't you--"

"Hey, Courf." Bossuet stepped up behind Courfeyrac, gently placing a hand on his shoulder. "Sorry, but. He's still working on staying upright from the house to the orchard. It might be better to save this conversation for--"

"You're right." Courfeyrac nodded, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Sorry; yeah, I shouldn't have--I'll go." He pushed past Bossuet, heading for the door of the cottage. Bossuet exchanged a glance with Feuilly, then followed Courfeyrac out of the room.

Feuilly just sat there on the bed, not sure what had just happened. Was Courfeyrac right to be angry with him? He tried to go over what he had said, to pick out what it was that had made Courfeyrac so upset.

To his surprise, Bossuet was back after just a minute or so. (Feuilly had expected him to walk Courfeyrac home; surely someone should be with him, to make sure he got there safe, as upset as he was).

"Are you okay?" Bossuet asked, leaning against the doorframe. Feuilly nodded. "Do you want to talk about what you were fighting about?"

"No. I don't even know what that was. It just came out of nowhere."

Bossuet laughed softly. "Courfeyrac . . . doesn't really ease into things, does he? He just goes right at it. He cools down pretty quickly too, though; don't worry. Talk to him in a few days, and I know you'll sort everything out."

"Okay. That's . . . that's good. Thanks."

"Well. It's getting late; I should probably turn in soon. If you're sure you're okay." Bossuet hesitated by the door. "Listen, I . . . I didn't overhear most of that, I promise, but--well, I just want to say that we're all _really_ glad you made it out all right."

Feuilly swallowed past the lump in his throat. "Thank you."

He turned out the light after Bossuet left and lay there in the darkness, staring up at the invisible ceiling above him, trying to sort things out in his mind. He'd been going so long on the assumption that he'd never really be important to anyone that it had become just part of the background of his thinking, never noticed but always there. It was hard to step back from it, to try to imagine what would be different without it there. It felt like playing a game of pretend, like he used to do with Lark so many years ago--let's pretend we're cats; let's pretend we're doctors; let's pretend we're spaceships; let's pretend we really matter to someone.

But Courfeyrac said he did. Courfeyrac said he should have noticed long ago.

 

* * *

People on Gideon didn't pay a lot of attention to children. (They were so little, so fragile; what was the point of making a fuss over a person who might not be around in a few months or even weeks?) Children kept out of the way and took care of themselves, until they were ten or eleven, big enough to start working in the mining center, at which time they started to become someone you could count on, almost like a real person. Some parents cherished their own children, and others kept themselves safely distant, but almost everyone got used to ignoring other people's children.

A very little boy crouching in the shadows of a hallway was very easy to overlook.

Feuilly sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, his fists pressed against his face, sobbing quietly. He had been sitting there like that for a long time, and the small part of his mind still paying attention to things thought he might stay there forever.

There were strange people in his family's pod. Or not _strange--_ he knew them, he'd lived alongside them for years, and you knew everyone in the colony at least by sight--but different. They didn't belong there. They had their own houses, and they shouldn't be in his home, cleaning the floor, putting away cups and buckets and rags.

But it didn't matter.

Feuilly wondered if a person could die from crying. He hoped they could. There were a lot of ways to die. He'd heard of people dying in the mining center when parts of their ragged clothing got caught in machinery. He'd seen people pulled back into the station by their tethers, stiff and blue-faced in spacesuits whose air systems or heating systems had finally failed. And he'd just watched his mother choke to death as her strength faded and she could no longer cough up the fluid filling her lungs.

She'd been sick for days--maybe for weeks. (It was hard to tell, on Gideon, who was sick and who was just glassy-eyed and stumbling from exhaustion.) It shouldn't have killed her; half the people in the colony were sick right now. Even some of the neighbors who were cleaning Feuilly's house were coughing from time to time. But three days ago, Feuilly's mother had just . . . not gotten up off the cot. And now she was dead.

The neighbors were talking about her, as they prepared her body for the colony's incinerator. "Just four days ago, we were working together," one of them said. Her voice echoed off the bare walls of the small room and carried clearly into the hallway. "But oh, you could tell she was fading."

"Aren't we all?" someone else asked. "She looked like that--big dark circles around her eyes, thin as a stick--for months. It was only a matter of time."

"She fought it for a while," an older voice agreed, "but she finally gave in. You could see the change in her face when I looked in on her yesterday. She'd given up already."

"And why not?" The question was a long sigh. "What was there to hope for--here, on this frozen chunk of worthless rock? Is there anything that was going to change, that she should have waited for?"

"You could say the same thing about any of us," the first voice objected.

"My point exactly. We've got to get out of here before this place kills us all."

"And you think things on the planet will be any better?"

The neighbor heaved another long, sad sigh. "No. At least it's warmer there, or so they say."

"That's reason enough for me to leave," another woman said. "He's right, after all--there's nothing for us here. The longer we stay on Gideon, the less reason any of us has to keep on living."

The neighbors came out of the housing pod then, shutting the door gently behind them. Their voices followed them down the hallway until they came to the first junction and parted ways, their goodbyes echoing for a few moments in the dimness as their footsteps retreated.

In the silence they'd left behind, Feuilly remained crouched in the shadows beyond the last working light panel, his arms clutched to his chest. The neighbors's words played over and over in his head: _She just gave in . . . there's nothing here . . . no reason to keep on living._ If they were right, the sickness was only half to blame for his mother's death. She'd been sick, but she'd also given up. She hadn't had any good reason to stay, and so she'd gone away.

 _But_ I _wanted her to stay!_ he wanted to cry. He wanted her back so badly, _ached_ for the feel of her arms around him, for the whisper of her voice in his ear. In this moment, it was the only thing in the world he needed--to have his mother with him.

But this was Gideon, and little children didn't matter very much.

 

 

* * *

 

The next evening, Courfeyrac didn't visit, and Feuilly realized that there'd only been a handful of nights since he'd been brought to the farm that Courfeyrac hadn't been there in the evening. He filed the fact away, and wondered what else he might have observed without really noticing it.

Grantaire and Bahorel came instead. They brought a box of supplies from town--protein cakes to supplement what Bahorel called the 'real food' produced on the farm, wire for fixing the gate on the shoats' pen, antibiotics for Feuilly--and updates on the resistance. Several of the groups that had sprung up around the city were planning a coordinated protest against TEC, and they already had more than three hundred people committed to participate. Because of TEC's response to such protests in the past, they planned to wait until the internet was restored, so that they could broadcast the protest live; with the eyes of the entire galaxy on them, the organizers hoped, TEC wouldn't dare fire on the peaceful crowd like they had before, and maybe they could get their voices heard.

There wasn't any word yet on when the internet would be back--the Colonial Authority said they were working with all proper haste to resolve the problem, and since TEC was also suffering from being cut off, Bahorel was hopeful it would be fixed soon. In the meantime, the groups were getting ready, preparing video streaming devices and signs and--just in case-- makeshift masks and body armor. In an ironic twist, Combeferre and Bahorel had ended up working together to create a homemade respirator mask design, based on the ones Feuilly had photographed in the refinery plant.

It made Feuilly feel a little better about sitting around doing nothing all day to know that down in the center of the city, the resistance groups were doing mostly the same thing, for the time being. It helped, too, that his bruises were fading and he could do easy work, like weeding the gardens or feeding the shoats, without wincing so much that he got sent back inside to rest.

It was good to be able to do something useful with his hands, and Feuilly found he enjoyed learning about how living things grew. He'd never done anything like this before; on Gideon they had no plants, and the occasional rat or beetle brought in on a ship was quickly caught and eaten. Even in St. Denis, on the planet's surface, surrounded by hillsides full of blue and purple grasses where furry little animals burrowed, the people of the city ate just like the colonists on Gideon did, albeit fancier--relying on protein cakes and vitamins and other imports from the inner planets. Feuilly hadn't known, until he saw the farm for the first time, that food came from plants and animals--and now he was learning how to grow them, what they needed to stay alive. It was exciting.

As he started to understand the basics of plant growth, Feuilly decided he'd dismissed the grafting project too quickly, that maybe there was something really interesting going on there after all. In the afternoon of the second day after his fight (if that was what it was; Feuilly still wasn't sure) with Courfeyrac, Feuilly headed out toward the orchard in search of Bossuet, to ask him to explain things again.

At first, the stand of trees seemed empty. But it was a nice day, with a brisk breeze up here in the hills that made what was probably oppressive heat down in the city a little more tolerable, so he decided to go for a walk around the edge of the orchard. And that was how he found Bossuet curled up in a hollow in the base of one of the old trees, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around himself.

"Hey," Feuilly said quietly. "Is everything all right?"

Bossuet jumped and raised his head, rubbing his eyes with the heel of one hand. "Sorry--yeah. Were you looking for me?" His eyes were red and he was avoiding meeting Feuilly's gaze.

Feuilly hesitated, then came closer and sat down on the tangle of roots next to the hollow. "What's the matter?"

Bossuet shook his head. "I just--I miss him so much. Sometimes it's hard."

"Do you feel like talking about it?" Feuilly asked.

Bossuet was silent for a long time, staring at the dead leaves and sticks around his feet. "I keep remembering things I never told him," he said finally. "Not--not big things, not secrets or anything. Just--one time, I was walking down Straight Street, and out of nowhere this lady appeared, screaming at me and calling me 'Lyle.' She had a pry-bar in her hand--she must have been working on something when she saw me, or maybe she was just always ready for this Lyle, I don't know--and she looked really angry, so of course I ran. She chased me half a mile before she gave up, screaming 'Lyle! Lyle! Lyle!' the whole way. But she never accused him--me--of anything, so I have no idea what he even did. He would've liked that story." His smile faded. "But that was the day Marius told us about the copper, and I forgot to tell him about it. I kept meaning to, but it slipped my mind every time I saw him."

Bossuet brushed a hand over his eyes. "Sometimes I think a hundred years wouldn't be enough for all the things I want to tell him. Every day there's something else--the birds do something funny, or I remember the words to the song he was humming earlier, or I just want to tell him how much I love him. But I can't."

Feuilly offered his good hand, and Bossuet took it, squeezing hard. "It'll get easier, I guess--they say it will, and logically I know it has to, or nobody would ever survive after the person they love dies. But it won't get _better_. No matter how much easier it gets, he's still going to be gone, and that'll never change."

He dropped his face to his knees, and Feuilly waited, holding his hand, while his shoulders shook with sobs. "I'm sorry," Feuilly murmured. "I'm so sorry." The words felt so small and useless, but he didn't know anything else to say.

After a few minutes, Bossuet sniffled and pulled himself together, reclaiming his hand to wipe his cheeks. "Thanks," he croaked. Feuilly put an arm around his shoulders, and Bossuet leaned into him, taking a deep, shaky breath. They sat for a while in silence, looking out at the ripples the wind made in the long hill grass.

"Do you ever regret it?" Feuilly asked quietly. "Loving somebody so much--only to lose them. Do you ever . . . think maybe it wasn't worth it?"

Bossuet's response wasn't the quick, decisive answer Feuilly had been expecting. Instead, he reached up and rubbed Feuilly's arm, choosing his words carefully. "Sometimes," he finally said. "Especially at first. It hurt so much, and sometimes I thought it would be better if I'd never met him. I wouldn't have had so much to lose then, you know?

"But the other side of that," he continued, "is that I wouldn't have had so much at all. I was--we were--really, _really_ happy. And if you have to accept loss to have that kind of happiness in your life, I--" He sighed. "I'm still going back and forth on it, to be honest. But the more time goes on, the more I think it was worth it--it _is_ worth it, even now that the best part is over." His voice cracked on the last phrase, and he laughed wetly, wiping his eyes. "Ask me again in six months, maybe."

"I will," Feuilly said. And it was only afterward, as they were walking back to the cottage together, that he realized how easily the words had come--as if expecting them both to still be there in six months was nothing.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA: I just added a short section to Chapter 11--it was originally going to be part of this chapter, but I changed my mind and decided it would fit better back there. So if you want to read about what happened to Feuilly's mom, take a look!

It was ironic that these in-between days--while Feuilly was a wanted fugitive from TEC, while he was recovering from being tortured and nearly killed, while the city was gearing up for the biggest challenge to TEC's hegemony in generations--were some of the most relaxing Feuilly had ever known. He only worked a few hours a day, and that only because Bossuet couldn't keep him in bed all the time. The weight of his debt, which had been constantly hanging over his head for the past two years, was unimportant now in the face of larger trouble. He was even learning to read a few words, tutored in the evenings by Bossuet or Combeferre or anyone who happened to be up at the farm. He had people around him all the time, looking out for him, almost as if they were on a deliberate project of convincing him that he'd always have people like this to count on.

Of course, it had to come to an end before long.

It was Grantaire who brought the news, coming into the cottage late one afternoon flushed and sweating from the long trek up from the city. He poured himself a big glass of water, gulped the whole thing in a single breath, his Adam's apple bobbing frantically, and set the glass the table with a flourish.

"Well, the internet's back," he announced.

"Don't laugh," he added, when Bossuet stifled a chuckle at his attitude. "I am the proud bearer of the news that may spark the biggest event in our planet's history--possibly the whole system's history, if you believe what they've been saying on the new sites."

"What are they saying now?" Feuilly asked eagerly, pushing aside the printout of a news article he'd been frowning at, trying to see how the letters worked together to make the words he already had half memorized; these documents, once so precious, were suddenly old news, not worth bothering with.

"Don't know," Grantaire said. "I haven't actually been on. Marius came from work to tell us it had been fixed, and Enjolras said let's all meet up here to look at the new stuff together. So I come bearing the message--and for that reason alone. Yes, my presence here is to keep you supplied with up-to-the-minute information and in _no way_ related to those sour purple fruits that we had last year, no indeed."

Bossuet laughed. "They're still not ripe, not for another month. But the pink ones are getting there. Want to go pick some? I bet we can get enough for everyone tonight."

"Or we could just eat them all ourselves immediately," Grantaire suggested with a crooked grin.

When the three of them returned to the cottage with a rather disappointing haul of fruit--enough for one bird-picked piece each, but not much more--the group had begun to collect. Musichetta and Combeferre were outside, the former giving the latter a demonstration of the automatic watering system she'd tried to rig up for one of the garden plots. Reluctantly, Combeferre broke away from their discussion of how they might differentiate the amount of water that fell on different parts of the garden to follow Feuilly inside so he could check the injuries that were still healing. They had to pick their way through an already-crowded main room to get to the relative privacy of the bedroom where Feuilly slept--Marius, Ep and Bahorel had filled up the room's limited furniture, and Courfeyrac was sprawled across the floor, his head propped on one elbow. As Feuilly and Combeferre crossed the room, his eyes flickered up to Feuilly's face, then quickly away.

"Have you seen anything from the news sites?" Feuilly asked as Combeferre gently unwrapped the bandages from his shoulder.

Combeferre shook his head. "No, they repossessed my phone when I got in trouble. Enjolras and Jehan are going to bring in what they find." He removed the last of the gauze from Feuilly's shoulder and pursed his lips. "Hm, these look inflamed still. Are they hurting you?"

"Not much," Feuilly said. He searched around for something else to talk about, something to distract himself from what Combeferre was doing; the depth of the gashes and the number of stitches they'd required didn't bother him much, but the fact that he didn't remember getting them made him feel queasy and uncomfortable. "How did you get in trouble, anyway?" he asked. "Was it for fighting against TEC?"

"Nothing nearly so noble," Combeferre said. He went over to the cupboard where the medical supplies Jehan had brought from the clinic were being stored. "I was digging into the chemical processes TEC was using to test for trace amounts of copper in ore samples. It made TEC uneasy, I guess--a lot of the workers in that project were getting sick from working with the chemicals, which was how I found out about the process in the first place--but I didn't have any plans to actually _do_ anything with the information. I was just curious about how it worked."

He sighed, his hands falling still on Feuilly's back for a moment, as if he needed to be talking in order to be working. "It bothered me that people were getting sick from it . . . but maybe not as much as it should have. The science side of it was too interesting--detecting the presence of copper at levels as low as 10 parts per billion. And if people were hurting because of it, well, that just seemed like part of the way things were. It was unfortunate, but not really something you could _do_ anything about."

"It's easy to get used to things and not question them," Feuilly agreed, remembering the first night he'd gone out with the Friends of BCA, the way Courfeyrac's eyes had widened in horror when Feuilly had described what he thought were the normal living conditions in the bonded workers' district.

"That's what I appreciate about this group of people," Combeferre admitted. "They question the things that I'm too content to just observe. I've spent so much of my life trying to understand how things work, I'm out of practice with asking how they _should_ work. Or how they can be changed."

"Do you think things here can be changed?"

Combeferre was quiet for a while, turning the roll of extra gauze over and over in his hands. "I do when I'm around Enjolras," he said. "When I'm back at the plant, and it's the same twelve-hour shift I've worked every day for the last two years, and I know we're all slowly being killed by what we're breathing in, it's hard to think the status quo is anything but unassailable. But Enjolras is so convinced that change is possible, that when I'm with him . . . it's hard not to believe in it too."

Someone knocked gently on the half-open door, and Marius stuck his head into the room. "They're here."

But as soon as they came out into the main room, Feuilly knew something was wrong. Jehan was very quiet, his hands folded in his lap. Enjolras's clenched jaw was the only part of him that was still; everything else--his fingers, his feet, his shoulders--practically vibrated with restrained tension. Feuilly would have said that he was angry, or afraid, except for the look of deep hurt in his eyes.

Enjolras didn't leave them waiting. "There's nothing about us online," he said as soon as Feuilly had taken the seat Ep cleared for him on the couch.

"We checked all the main sites," Jehan said, his eyes still fixed on his hands. "And the fringe sites--liberal and conservative. And all the blogs that were carrying the story, two weeks back. There's nothing."

Jehan's voice was harsh and loud in the heavy silence. "The big news story now is about some man on one of the inner planets who got ahold of a weapon and shot up a commuter hub. We went back in the archives, and before the shooting all the stories were about failing peace talks between two of the big inner systems, and before that it was the results of a sporting event." His lip twisted in derision. "We're seven news cycles back; they stopped talking about BCA just a few days after they started."

There was a long silence as everyone processed the news. Ep picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. Bahorel chewed dourly at his pink fruit, juice dripping from his hand onto the floor, unheeded. Courfeyrac's eyes flitted between everyone's solemn faces.

"Is it a lack of information?" Musichetta finally asked. "If we sent them more--if we used Ep's contact again--would they start reporting on us again?"

"They have reporters," Combeferre pointed out. "Even the news sites based on the inner planets keep reporters in field offices out in the outer systems. Maybe not on BCA, but somewhere in the Beta Caeli system, or one of our neighbors. If they really wanted new information--real information they could trust instead of photos from an anonymous source--they could get it."

"We could try, though--remind them that's we're here."

"But what would be the point?" Bahorel said darkly. "If they won't commit a single reporter to finding out what's going on here, can we really expect them to _do_ anything to help us out? The whole point of getting into the intersystem news was to get support from the people in power. But we're nothing to them--a sensational story to bump up page views for a few days. That's all."

"Maybe . . ." Marius said slowly, "maybe it's only fair? We're just one planet, in a really big galaxy." He frowned, rubbing the back of his neck. "There are so many problems, so many people in trouble, why should--how can we expect the whole galaxy to drop everything and care only about us?"

"But this is--yes, it's all important," Enjolras protested. "But how can people not care? Even if there's a hundred problems, a thousand problems--how can you hear about things like this and just . . . just shrug it off? I don't understand."

"It's exhausting, all that caring," Grantaire pointed out, his usual wry tone subdued. "You can't keep it up forever. Eventually you have to pick and choose what you're going to put your effort into. Guess nobody picked us."

The conversation started to break up into several little ones then, as people finished thinking through the news and started trying to talk their thoughts out. Bahorel was ranting to Bossuet and Grantaire--anyone who would listen, really--about the fickleness and dishonesty of the journalistic profession; Musichetta and Ep were talking over Feuilly's head about whether or not what was happening on BCA was relevant to the rest of the galaxy; on the other side of the room, Enjolras was explaining the technological difficulties of communicating with other planets to Combeferre.

The air in the room was thick with summer heat and charged with frustration, there was too much noise, and everything was wrong. It had all fallen apart--the rest of the galaxy _didn't care about them._

Feuilly, to his dismay, felt tears sting his eyes. He tried to blink them back, to be businesslike and practical about this. It was a setback--or maybe not a setback, maybe it was the end of everything they'd been hoping for--but that didn't mean he needed to cry about it. Everyone else was keeping it together.

But instead of blinking away, he found the tears welling up faster, catching in his eyelashes. (He cried so easily these days; maybe once you'd broken down screaming in front of strangers, there was nothing left to keep from from falling apart in front of friends. He hated it.) He brushed at the tears and more took their place, rolling down his cheeks.

"Feuilly, are you okay?" Marius was asking, and Musichetta was leaning over Bossuet's head to rub his arm, and he didn't want this pity, all these eyes on him. He stood up abruptly--he started to say something but the first word was so choked he thought better of it--and pushed his way out of the room.

He stood alone in the darkness of the little bedroom, staring blindly at the shelves on the wall opposite the door, stifling sobs into his arm. He wanted to fold up into nothing and crawl into a corner--or even better, to disappear entirely. Had sadness always felt this crushing? Or had something inside him snapped, back in the basement of the TEC building, leaving him damaged and unfixable?

The door creaked open and then closed behind him, and he turned around, expecting to see Courfeyrac coming toward him, open-armed. Instead, Grantaire was leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest.

"You okay?" he asked quietly.

"I'm just so--so _angry!"_ Feuilly choked out. "How can they have forgotten us? How can they not--not care? They know what's happening and they're just going to sit by and do nothing while TEC crushes us. They were--we put all our hopes in them, and now . . . it's all wrong!" Another wave of sobs cut him off, and he turned away, angry at the galaxy for abandoning them, angry at himself for falling apart over it.

Grantaire didn't try to hug him or talk him down; he just waited. "I'm sorry," he said at last, when Feuilly had halfway pulled himself together. "It's really too bad."

Feuilly laughed wetly. "You don't believe in any of this."

"No," Grantaire admitted. "But you do. You really wanted this, and the world let you down, and--and I can't say I'm _surprised_ , but. I _am_ sorry."

Feuilly sat heavily on the bed, dropping his head to rest in his hands. After a moment, the mattress creaked as Grantaire sat down next to him. "Were we stupid, to believe we could win?" Feuilly muttered between his fingers. His voice was still awful and shaky.

There was a moment of silence, then Grantaire's fingers hesitantly brushed Feuilly's back, between his shoulder blades. "You're asking the wrong person, I think," he said. "I'll be honest, I never understood how you--any of you--could be as idealistic as you are. The universe has dealt me enough shit that I don't have any faith in it--and I've had a pretty average life. How anyone could get kicked in the balls as many times as you and still manage to believe that the universe is a good place and People are fundamentally good and everything will turn out okay . . ." He sighed, and patted Feuilly's back. "I'm not saying it's stupid--I'm _not_. It's just--impressive."

"I don't expect everything to turn out okay for _me_ ," Feuilly said. "I'm not that naive. But that people are basically good . . ." He paused, thinking. Did he really believe it? After everything that he'd seen these past few weeks--could he?

"Yeah," he decided finally. "I do believe it. I mean, if you don't believe in the big things--in people, in justice--what do you have to keep you going?"

"I have you," Grantaire answered immediately, and Feuilly raised his head, surprised. "I have Bossuet. And Musichetta, and Bahorel--all of you. I maybe don't believe in People with a capital 'P'--er, that is, people in general. But I believe in all the particular specific individual people around me, the people I actually know. That's all you can really count on, I guess."

Feuilly thought of Absolon, heading off for the frontier with just a few weeks' notice; about Joly, blinking out of their lives in the space of an evening. He thought--for the first time in weeks--about Lark, who might be on the other side of the galaxy, or just a few planets away, or dead. He thought about the people he himself had left behind on Gideon--because it went both ways, didn't it? Everyone was always leaving everyone else.

"That's not a lot to count on."

"I guess not," Grantaire said. "But it's all there is."

Feuilly didn't know what to say to that--and didn't trust his voice to be steady anyway--so he just sat there in silence. Grantaire waited with him, his arm still draped over Feuilly's shoulders. Feuilly let himself lean into the touch, just a little, and Grantaire squeezed his shoulder, just a little.

"We should probably go back in."

"Whenever you're ready."

The room had fallen silent by the time Feuilly and Grantaire slipped back in, but to Feuilly's relief nobody said anything about the way he'd rushed out. Bossuet, leaning against the couch, tugged Feuilly down to sit on the floor next to him, and Grantaire flopped down on the arm of the couch behind them. Feuilly looked around the room, at all the tired faces, their eyes radiating hurt or anger or betrayal, and wondered where they would go from here.

Outside the open windows of the cottage, the sky was dark, and a breeze that was _almost_ refreshing sneaked into the stuffy room. Feuilly hadn't noticed the noise of the night insects, but now that nobody was talking, their droning seemed deafening.

"You know what?" Bahorel said suddenly. "I say fuck it, we should just do everything we were planning anyway. It was the longest of long shots anyway, we all knew it. What's the difference, really, between one in a million and zero in a million?"

Combeferre lifted his head, considering. "I know some groups are planning to sabotage TEC's infrastructure--more bombs, some attacks on the networks. But the main plan was the coordinated protest, which was going to be aimed mostly at attracting intersystem attention to our grievances against TEC. There wouldn't be any reason to go through with that, so you'd be left with--"

"I'm still marching," Bahorel interrupted him. "I don't care if I'm the only one."

"It would be suicide," Combeferre said flatly. "What's the value in putting out a message if nobody's listening?"

"Someone _is_ listening," Jehan said suddenly. Feuilly's eyes immediately jumped to the phone Jehan had been browsing, but it lay untouched under Jehan's chair. " _We_ are. There are four million people on this planet, and we might not have any political or economic power, but that doesn't mean we don't matter--or that we aren't listening to what we say about ourselves."

Jehan leaned forward, his eyes bright. "If we go out and protest still, even though nobody outside our system will ever hear of us, we're saying that we care about BCA--about the bonded workers trapped in the system for life, about the people in the Needle District slowly dying of exposure to toxic chemicals, about the miners starving on the frontier because they pay 40% of their yield to TEC in transport fees--that we care about them enough to stand up for their rights, no mater what the cost."

"That we still believe in BCA," Bahorel added, a faint smile growing on his lips.

"When we started out," Feuilly said slowly, staring at his hands, "we didn't have the news sites or the journalists or anything beyond this city. It was just us." He looked up to see Courfeyrac nodding, Jehan nodding, Enjolras leaning forward in his chair. He cleared his throat and continued, louder. "And we stood up to TEC anyway because we thought it was right. We said that we believed we had the right--and the responsibility--to decide our own destiny. None of that has changed. Or at least, it doesn't have to."

"I'm in," Enjolras said. "Even if it never goes anywhere, even if I get hurt or arrested." He glanced over at Feuilly, and Feuilly was suddenly very conscious of his still-healing bruises and cuts, of the splint on his arm. "Even if it's the last decision I ever make," Enjolras finished firmly.

"We need to talk to the other groups," Musichetta said. "They might have other ideas about what they want to do, or when, or how. Or they might want to call it off completely--and that's something we need to take seriously. If we know the names of other leaders, then it's not just our own lives we're putting on the line in protesting." She sighed. "But yes. I think we should propose going through with the protest to the rest of the groups. And if they agree to it, then I do too."

"I think they will," Enjolras said. "I really do. Even though we're cut off from the rest of the galaxy and we've lived our whole lives under TEC's shadow, the people of this planet are so independent and resourceful and brave." He smiled, glancing around the room. "I believe in them--in us."

To Feuilly's surprise, Ep was the next one to volunteer. "I'll do it too," she said, her eyes flickering challengingly around the group, as if daring somebody to question her commitment. Bahorel clapped her on the back as Bossuet declared he was in as well; Marius, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac followed.

"I've always been a sucker for lost causes," Grantaire said, with a laugh that was just a little on the manic side. "Sure, count me in."

For a minute, they sat in silence, the weight of what they'd just promised pressing down on the room. Then Combeferre cleared his throat.

"I don't want to break up an important moment," he said. "But I _do_ need to report to the plant at six tomorrow morning. So I'm going to head back down to the city."

"I'll walk with you," Enjolras volunteered. "I think we're finished, right? We can't really go any further with our own plans until we talk to the other groups."

The cottage cleared out quickly, Enjolras and Combeferre going off lost in a discussion about tax systems, Marius and Jehan following after, practicing a language Feuilly didn't recognize, Ep trailing after alone; Bahorel and Musichetta stayed behind for a few minutes to check on their farm projects and get updates from Bossuet.

Feuilly tugged at Courfeyrac's sleeve as he was about to follow Ep out into the night. "Can you stay for a minute?"

Courfeyrac's face was still unusually solemn, but he nodded. "Of course."

Feuilly realized then that he didn't really know what he wanted to say--just that he wanted to fix things. He shifted from foot to foot, staring at the floor as if hoping to find the answer in the scuff marks on the dull plastic sheeting.

"I'm sorry," he said finally. "I don't . . . I'm not sure I understand what I did. But you're upset with me, so I'm sorry, and if there's something I can do to fix it, I want to. Because--" He took a deep breath. "Because you're really important to me, and I don't want to stop being friends. Unless you _do_. So."

The stiff distance Courfeyrac had held on his face for the past few days dropped away. "Of _course_ I don't," he said quickly, stepping closer to Feuilly. "I just, I thought you didn't care about it, I guess maybe I was just being stubborn. But . . . well, it's hard to tell with you, sometimes, whether you care about people or not. I mean, I _know_ you care about people, that's not coming out right, you're the most generous, altruistic--I mean, whether you want specific people around. You seem . . . I don't know, indifferent. Like--like it doesn't matter to you whether we're there or not."

"I don't mean to be rude," Feuilly said. "You're--all our friends are great. I care about you a lot. But I don't want to ask too much."

"Too much?" Courfeyrac wrinkled his nose. "What do you mean?"

"People have lots of other things to do and people to be with, and I don't want people to feel like they _have_ to--I don't know--just because I--"

"You're talking like friendship is asking a favor of someone," Courfeyrac laughed. When Feuilly didn't join in, he grew serious. "Feuilly. You're an amazing person, you know that, right? You're kind, and unselfish, and dependable, and you care about _everything_ and--aaah . . ." He made a strangled, inarticulate noise, flapping his hands. "Has it never occurred to you that people might _want_ to be around you? And--and count themselves lucky if you want to be their friend?"

Feuilly ducked his head, feeling the blood rush to his cheeks. "If you say it like that, it sounds so straightforward. But . . . well, it hasn't always been true."

Courfeyrac grabbed Feuilly's shoulders firmly. "It's true now, okay? You have friends here--and we're not going anywhere. You'll have to fight to get rid of us."

Things always came down to a choice, in life. Your father or your mother left you and you could choose to let that fester in a knot of bitterness inside your chest, or you could choose to put on a smile and try to find your happiness somewhere else in the world. You got hurt or sick and lost everything you'd saved up, and you could either choose to just give up, or to keep trying and hoping and working. The people who'd promised to help you fight disappeared on you, and you had to decide whether to let that be your answer, or to fight for what you believed anyway, no matter the cost.

There was a choice Feuilly had been making for years, even if he hadn't realized it: You could choose to believe that the world would always let you down, that people would always leave you behind--that you were the sort of person who other people don't care about. If you made that choice, a lot of things could happen that you wouldn't even see, stuck as you were in the way you'd chosen to see the world.

But if you could break the pattern, Feuilly was learning, you could notice those things that told a different story; you could maybe even start to believe the story they told. The story Courfeyrac was holding out to Feuilly now.

It was time to believe it.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In addition to the warnings that apply to the whole fic, please note that this chapter contains depictions of anxiety/panic attacks.

Two days later, Bahorel came up to the cottage to report that leaders from eight of the largest resistance groups in the city had met and decied to go through with the mass protest, even if nobody was watching. They'd change the focus of the event a bit, he reported, grinning gleefully: less expression of grievances, more mayhem. There were plans for building movable barriers for the protesters to shelter behind, for coordinated attacks on TEC's networks to disrupt their communications during the protest, for bombs. It didn't sound like a suicidal last stand, Feuilly thought, as Bahorel described the plans that were in the works, his eyes glinting with excitement . . . it sounded almost like a real plan.

They would march in 8 days.

Seven days before the protest, Enjolras and Jehan and Combeferre came up to the cottage with a huge stack of plastic printouts. They started laying them out on the living room floor, decided there wasn't enough space, and moved out to assemble what became a giant map of the city in the yard, shooing Bahorel's birds away as they worked. Jehan had brought some glue to stick the pieces of the map together, and they methodically worked their way from the bonded workers' district in the southeast corner all the way up and across the city to the hills northwest where the farm (though unmarked on the map) was located. Before the map was even finished, Enjolras and Combeferre had started discussing routes of approach to TEC's headquarters and base locations and vulnerable spots; from time to time curious shoats wandered over to see what all the fuss was about, and Bossuet had to chase them back into the meadow, waving his hat and whooping while they placidly trotted away.

Five days before the protest, Courfeyrac, Marius, Ep, Bossuet, and Feuilly spent the evening collecting rocks of throwing size in the fields behind the cottage. Courfeyrac and Bossuet spent the entire time coming up with slogans to chant during the protest that ranged from the straightforward "TEC must go" to a complicated chant that packed three different layers of puns into two rhyming lines.

"What do you think?" Courfeyrac asked the other three. Feuilly, unsure how serious they were about the bizarre slogan, and not wanting to ruin the joke by missing it, shrugged; Marius said something diplomatically vague.

Ep rolled her eyes. "It's a stupid slogan, and nobody's going to remember it," she said bluntly. Courfeyrac doubled over laughing and had to set down his sack of rocks until he could get his breath back.

Three days before the protest, Combeferre came up to the cottage to collect the medical supplies he'd stored there when he was treating Feuilly. While he was there, he checked Feuilly's injuries one more time. He wasn't fully recovered, Combeferre declared, but he was getting close; his ribs and broken arm were healing as fast as could be expected and none of his cuts were infected. As long as he felt up to it, he had his unofficial doctor's official permission to participate in the protests. It was lucky, really, that they'd been delayed by the internet going down; it had given Feuilly just enough time to heal up. Feuilly smiled and tried to ignore the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Two days before the protest, Courfeyrac came running up the hill to the farm, arriving so out of breath that he could barely wheeze out, "We have--someone--watching!"

Feuilly was on his feet, looking around for hidden cameras or guards, but Courfeyrac, doubled over and clinging to the doorframe, waved a printout at them. Bossuet took it and scanned the text while Courfeyrac gasped for breath.

"It's a post on a news blog," Bossuet told Feuilly. "The title is 'Why we're not talking about Beta Caeli A anymore--and why we should be,' and it was posted . . ." He looked up at Courfeyrac, his eyes wide. "It was posted this morning?"

Courfeyrac nodded. "Read . . . the last paragraph!"

"Um . . . the journalist says, 'On the off-chance that Beta Caeli A comes back online, and that someone on the planet--anyone--happens to read this post: Please contact me. Another information dump, or even just updates on what's going on on the ground there, is essential to bring this story back to life. I know intersystem communication is difficult on the outer planets, but I have some workarounds I've developed with other outer-planet contacts, so please send me a message at this link or leave a comment on this post letting me know how I can get in touch with you. There is at least one person out here that is still listening for you."

"Enjolras sent him a message," Courfeyrac panted, "and he messaged back right away! He says he has a--an encrypted chanel or a--a something, I don't understand all those technical terms, Enjolras does, but he has a way for us to send him video of the protests--live video! He's going to stream it on the news site he writes for. _Everyone is going to see what happens!_ "

The fact that the protests would be streamed on the intersystem network had a surprisingly small effect on the preparations. After all, the plans were already made for most of the action the protesters would take, and with just forty-eight hours to go, they couldn't make any big changes. The video streaming itself took surprisingly little setup: All they needed was a phone and a computer that could be physically connected into the planet's network, to serve as the link between the phone and the journalist, whose name was Park Iseul. Jehan seemed the safest choice to carry the phone at the protest--level-headed enough not to drop it or forget to point it at the action, tech-savvy enough to fix minor connection problems. The only other change required was that someone who could read well needed to stay by the linked computer, to communicate with Park; the reading members of the group drew straws for the task and it fell to Courfeyrac (who seemed both disappointed and relieved, Feuilly thought, to be out of the action).

But despite how little their actual plans had been affected, the fact that someone was watching changed everything. The protest had gone from what was essentially a suicide mission to being a very, very dangerous attack on a massive intersystem corporation, with an actual chance of success--sliver-thin, but it was there. Strangely enough, it made Feuilly more nervous than he'd been before. When failure had been inevitable, it was less important; now that there was a chance they'd succeed, the odds were somehow more terrifying.

The night before the protest, Feuilly woke up tangled in sweat-drenched sheets, his heart pounding in his ears and a scream trapped in his throat. For a moment, the darkened room was his basement cell in the TEC building; and there wasn't enough air; and he was going to die. Even after he realized where he was- _-safe, you're safe, you're at the farm, nobody's here but you and Bossuet_ \--the room still felt like a trap. He stumbled out of the cottage and across the yard behind the building, the nightmare chasing him farther and farther out into the open until he came up against the fence and stopped there, leaning against the sagging wood, taking deep, shuddering breaths of the night air until his legs stopped shaking.

A few minutes later, Bossuet's bare feet whispered across the grass. He glanced quickly over at Feuilly's face, then draped himself over the fence beside him; they stared out over the hills in silence, and the night's calm settled back down around the cottage.

"All right?" Bossuet asked, after a long time.

Feuilly nodded. "Nightmare." He sighed, rubbing his eyes. "It was scary as hell, but I know it's not real. I'm fine, you can go back to bed."

"I wasn't asleep," Bossuet said. "I can't stop thinking about tomorrow. It's . . . it's going to be big." He laughed ruefully. "Probably not a great idea to go into it sleep-deprived, but what can you do?"

"What do you think will happen tomorrow?" Feuilly asked, very quietly.

Bossuet waited a long while before replying. "With TEC, and the news sites, and all that--I don't know. It's long odds, but miracles can happen. With us . . . ?" He sighed heavily. "I think . . . I think probably it's foolish to think we're all going to make it out."

Hearing him say it was like a cold stone dropping into Feuilly's stomach, as if saying it out loud made it real. But at the same time, Feuilly had been thinking it all week. In a way, it was a relief to know he wasn't the only one.

"I used to not worry about the future," Bossuet continued. "Or at least, I tried not to. Ever since Joly died, I can't help it." He laughed softly. "It's funny--you'd think losing the most important person to you would mean you didn't care _what_ happens next. Instead, I can't stop thinking about who else I could lose."

"It's important, though." Feuilly's voice sounded very small in the darkness, and he wished he could fill it up with the rock-solid certainty Enjolras always seemed to have. "To stand up against the corporations of the universe, to show them we're not afraid even with all the power they have. We're speaking up on behalf of all people who are oppressed and silenced--all the bonded workers and miners and refinery workers on BCA, and on the other planets--and all the service workers on the slip ships, and everyone who sells himself into slavery to feed his kid . . . it's so much bigger than all of us. In the face of all that, what do our lives matter?"

Feuilly hadn't realized how badly he needed a hug until Bossuet wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "It's important," Bossuet echoed, squeezing Feuilly's arm. "But so are you. I know I can't expect it--but I _hope_ we all make it through tomorrow safe."

They would march in 8 hours.

 

They met at Courfeyrac's early the next morning. It felt strange, Feuilly thought, to be walking through the city in the predawn darkness again, as if he were walking in to work at the refinery on any ordinary day. This was the wealthy part of town they were walking through, but all the prefab buildings were the same handful of basic shapes and designs, and in the dim light you couldn't tell that they weren't rusting apart at the seams or packed to three times their intended capacity; the shadows hid the alleys that should have been full of trash, and if Feuilly didn't look too closely at anything he could almost make himself believe that he was just walking to Plant D to work his usual shift.

Except that he could hear Bossuet beside him, his boots slapping gently against the pavement, his breath coming quick and nervous. The sounds wouldn't let Feuilly forget--even when he closed his eyes and tried to pretend that everything was normal--that today wasn't just an ordinary day. That after today there might never be another ordinary day.

It was still cool outside, but Courfeyrac's housing was packed with people and quickly getting stuffy. Enjolras and Marius were hunched over the computer, calling across the room to Jehan, who was holding up a phone, quickly aiming its lens at different people. "What if we attached it to your chest or something?" Marius was asking. "Then you'd have both hands free, and you wouldn't have to worry about dropping it."

Musichetta was laying out gear on the table in the center of the living space--shields made from plastic bottles and foam insulation, old mining helmets, arm guards that looked a lot like the splint Feuilly still wore on his right arm. Ep and Grantaire were sitting cross-legged on the floor almost under the table, grimly filling small bags with the rocks they'd collected on the farm. Most of the room was filled with signs; Combeferre was nailing handles to some of them, and Bahorel painting messages on others while Courfeyrac fanned them. Feuilly couldn't read most of the slogans, but there were several written in pictographs, and a few with the combination of letters he recognized as _I believe in BCA._

Courfeyrac bounced to his feet as Feuilly and Bossuet came in, jumping over drying signs and ducking Jehan's camera arm to come hug them both. "Ready to take down TEC?" he asked. "To start a new era in the history of this world? Also, have you had breakfast? We have a lot of food in the kitchen--and coffee, if you want that."

"Coffee?" Bossuet's eyes lit up even as he yawned incongruously. "Yes. That I need."

There was so much to get done before they would be ready to leave--setting up the video equipment, distributing signs and weapons and protective gear, testing the connection with the journalist, making sure everyone knew the location of the empty housing pod they'd retreat to if everything went to hell, handing out bottles of water and protein cakes . . . and still the time seemed to fly by at double speed. Before Feuilly knew it, the sky outside was fully light, and Courfeyrac was hugging everyone goodbye. His heart started pounding in his ears; it couldn't be time to go already--how had everything happened so quickly?

"Be careful," Courfeyrac murmured in his ear, half crushing him in a hug. "Will you--please? I know it's important, but . . . I want you to come back."

Feuilly pulled himself together, pushing down the sudden rush of nerves enough to mutter, "I'll do my best." Courfeyrac let him go and Feuilly followed the others down the street. At the corner, he glanced back to see Courfeyrac standing alone in the doorway to the pod; he lifted a hand to wave at Feuilly, smiling bravely even though his eyes swam with tears.

Someone in the city was shouting. They were still too far away to make out the words, or even the tone--was it slogans being flung at the TEC headquarters? Security officers shouting at protesters to disband? A mob in a panic? There was no way of knowing, but Feuilly sensed the change in the group as the sound went from the faintest snatch, possibly imagined, to a faint but umistakable clamor from the center of the city. They picked up their pace, and Enjolras's empassioned patter at the front of the group rose in pitch. Feuilly's fingertips were tingling.

Grantaire caught his elbow just in time as a scrap of plastic slipped under Feuilly's boots, sending him off balance. "Okay there with the walking?" Grantaire asked him. "I hear we'll be doing a lot of it today--possibly some running or even stamping in the mix too; better make sure you've got at least the basic technique down, it all builds off each other, y'know. You up for all that?" He was laughing, his voice quick and pitched a little higher than normal, but his dark eyes were serious.

Feuilly nodded breathlessly. "'m fine," he muttered. Reluctantly, he pulled his arm away from Grantaire's grip and stumbled on alongside him, fixing his eyes on Bossuet's feet, letting Grantaire's rapid-fire rambling fill his ears and drown out the sound of the shouting up ahead. One step after another, it added up to a full block; and the blocks added up to streets, and before they knew it they would be in the downtown area, and then everything would be fine, they would be caught up in the energy and momentum of the crowd and there would be no time to feel afraid and he could do this, he could _do this,_ he could--

But he _couldn't_ ; something had his chest gripped tight and it was hard to get enough air. Black spots danced before his eyes, and his legs were shaking and each step he took toward the center of the city clenched the vise tighter around his heart. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe.

Someone was gripping his elbow, holding up half his weight. He realized he had stopped walking and was doubled up, half leaning against the nearest building. The others were half a block ahead, unaware that Feuilly had fallen behind.

"Are you okay?" Grantaire's voice was almost inaudible through the roaring that filled Feuilly's ears.

Feuilly shook his head, dizzy. "I--I can't breathe right."

"Here, why don't you sit down a minute?" Grantaire suggested. "I'll run up ahead and get Combeferre, okay? I'll be right back."

Feuilly sank down onto the pavement, suppressing the irrational urge to grab Grantaire's sleeve as he turned to go, to beg him not to leave. Combeferre was a few hundred feet away. Why was he so scared? He leaned his head back against the pitted metal of the building behind him and tried to get control of his breathing.

Grantaire returned with Combeferre, Enjolras and Bossuet close behind them. Combeferre dropped to his knees beside Feuilly, frowning. "Everything okay?"

"I--don't know," Feuilly gasped. "I just--all of a sudden--" He was shaking from head to foot, every muscle painfully tense.

Combeferre glanced up at Enjolras, then back at Feuilly. "You're breathing awfully fast. Can you slow down a little?"

Feuilly tried his best, but his breath just got shallower and more frantic, catching in his throat like sobs. He felt so scared, but he didn't know why--just that every taut nerve in his body was screaming _no no no, get out, get away!_ Even Bossuet's hand gently rubbing his back was just setting him more on edge. "What's--happening?"

"I think you're having a panic attack," Combeferre said. "Possibly because what's going on now is too similar to things that have happened in the past . . . It'd be a stressful situation for anyone, but given what you've been through, it's not surprising this would set you off."

"I think you should go back to Courfeyrac's," Bossuet said quietly, his fingers tracing up and down between Feuilly's shoulder blades.

Feuilly shook his head, hating himself for the way his heart had leaped in relief at the suggestion. "No," he gasped. "No, I have to go with you. I--" He broke off, unable to even get the words "I can do it" out when everything inside him was straining toward the escape he'd been offered. He _wanted_ to say that he could do it, that he'd just shake this moment off and be fine. But he didn't think he could.

"You really shouldn't be here," Bossuet said. "It's not fair, to ask that of you, after everything you've been through."

"But--"

"We weren't thinking," Grantaire agreed, cutting off Feuilly's objections. "I mean, come on--the guy's been tortured, his arm's still in a splint, for Christ's sake-- _sure_ , let's throw him into the middle of a protest where he could get hurt again, or even captured, that's _real_ considerate."

"Nobody forced me to--I wanted--"

"It's all right--not everybody has to do everything," Bossuet urged. "Just sit this one out, okay?" He squeezed Feuilly's hand, his dark eyes earnest.

"Okay," Feuilly muttered, hating himself for it. Already, just knowing he wasn't going to have to go into the protest, his breathing was easier, betraying just how much of a coward he was. Tears of shame welled up in his eyes and he ducked his head, trying to hide them. It was for the best, he told himself as Combeferre patted him on the shoulder and told him he was making a wise choice; he'd only hamper everyone else, maybe even putting them in danger because he couldn't manage to hold it together.

"I'll walk back with you," Bossuet offered. "We haven't gone too far; I should be able to catch up."

"No--no, I'm fine." Feuilly pushed himself to his feet. "You should go--I've slowed you down enough already."

Grantaire threw an arm around his shoulders in a kind of half hug. "Be careful; don't push yourself. Remember, you were stuck in bed drinking soup through a straw, like, four days ago."

Enjolras shifted nervously from foot to foot. "If you're sure you'll be all right . . . maybe we should--"

"I'm sorry," Feuilly blurted out. He looked down at his feet, unable to meet Enjolras's eyes. "I wanted to be a part of this--to do something to help." He took a shaky breath, trying to keep the teltale waver out of his voice. "I wish I wasn't so . . ."

"Feuilly." Enjolras said his name like it was a prayer. "Feuilly. You've done _more_ than enough to help already. You got the pictures that made the whole galaxy aware of what's going on here, that got us the contact with Park. You nearly died fighting for BCA's freedom. If you never did anything else in your _life_ , it'd be enough."

He pulled Feuilly into a hug. "Nobody's going to think any less of you for not doing this one thing," he said quietly. "All right?"

Feuilly nodded into his shoulder. "Good luck," he whispered, still not trusting his voice. "Give TEC hell for me."

Enjolras grinned, his face lighting up. "We will."

The walk back to Courfeyrac's felt so much shorter, than it had when they'd gone out. Feuilly's face burned with shame as he got closer and closer to the apartment. He kept arguing with himself, trying to convince himself that if he just pushed himself a little harder, if he could just get over this stupid fear--he _knew_ what was at risk and he was okay with it; it wasn't fair that his body didn't agree--he could find the guts to do what was needed. But every time he stopped, ready to turn around and run after the others, his heart started pounding and his chest tightened up, and he knew he'd never make it all the way to the protests. The second he saw one of those black-helmeted guards, he'd freeze up and be useless. It wasn't fair to dump that on the others, to make them take care of him instead of doing what they'd gone out to do.

And so he found himself back at Courfeyrac's door, loathing himself for it but unable to go anywhere else. He hesitated there, knowing by this time that he wouldn't go back, that there was no way he could do it--but not quite ready to face Courfeyrac.

The door opened before he had a chance to knock, and Courfeyrac was pulling him close in a tight hug.

"I couldn't do it," Feuilly muttered.

"I know," Courfeyrac said. "They told me to watch for you. It's okay. Are you alright now?"

"Yeah."

"Good--then come in and watch! They're almost to the TEC building." Courfeyrac pulled him over to the desk where the computer was set up. A slightly fuzzy video showed the unsteady view from the camera mounted on Jehan's chest--a shot of Bahorel and Enjolras walking down one of the major streets. The street was uncannily empty, and a few of the buildings had fencing or corrugated metal nailed up over their windows. The TEC headquarters building was visible up ahead, looming over the single-story prefab buildings, and you could hear the sound of chanting, coming through faint and tinny. Next to the video was a window filled with text in blue and black. As Feuilly looked at the screen, a new line popped up in blue.

"This is Park talking to us," Courfeyrac explained, pointing at the lines of text. "He had a lot of questions! While we were waiting for the others to get to the protests, I filled him in on what happened since we sent the photos. Can I tell him you're here? He'll be thrilled to talk to you."

"Okay," Feuilly said, and Courfeyrac's fingers flew over the keys as he fired off a few more messages. Park's answer came back a few seconds later.

"Okay, he says: 'Feuilly, it's an honor to meet you. Would you mind talking a little about what happened to you?' You can say no if you want."

"No, it's fine."

"'Great,'" Courfeyrac read, as more blue text popped up in reply. "'Can you tell me what happened to you two weeks ago?'"

Feuilly frowned. "I thought you said you told him already?"

"I did, but I think he wants to get it in your words--for his blog," Courfeyrac explained. "They always want the words of the person closest to the event possible. It makes the article more believable, if he can write 'I talked to the person this happened to' instead of having to say 'Someone who knows this person told me . . .' People are more likely to accept it."

"Ok, yeah. I never thought about that, but that makes sense."

"So just tell me whatever you want to say and I'll type it. And if you don't want to talk about anything, just skip it."

If he was honest with himself, Feuilly didn't really want to talk about _any_ of it. But if this was for the articles Park was writing. If what Feuilly said would be transmitted across the galaxy and thousands of people would read it (millions, Combeferre had said, but that seemed like a daydream)--if talking about it would help things get better--how could he say no? So he sketched out the outline of what had happened, from taking the pictures of the protective suits in Plant D all the way through getting dragged out of the basement of the TEC building half-dead; Courfeyrac's fingers flew over the keys trying to get it all down as Feully spoke.

"Okay, another question," Courfeyrac reported after Feuilly had finished. "He says, 'Can you talk about why you decided to take such a huge risk, to get those photos? Was it worth it?'"

"Of course it was," Feuilly said. "Here on BCA, we're nothing--a lot of us didn't realize it before, but TEC has us sitting in the palm of their hand. We depend on them for everything--everyone, not just the bonded workers; even independent miners buy their food and supplies from TEC, half of them use TEC's transportation networks, most of the doctors on the planet work in TEC clinics. If TEC suddenly pulled out and left BCA, or decided for some reason not to sell us supplies anymore, we'd be dead." Even Bahorel and Musichetta, he thought, with their farm up in the foothills outside the city . . . even they still ate protein cakes at two meals out of three.

"And TEC can do anything they want to to us," he went on. "The Colonial Authority isn't there for us. We have no real contact with anyone outside our planet. We thought the intersystem codes protected us, but it turns out that if TEC wants to break the codes, they can just do it: With nobody to see what they do--or to care--they can get away with anything. We found that out two months ago when our friend Joly and three other people were captured during a protest and tortured to death--for no reason other than to prove to us just how much control TEC has over our lives."

In the video pane, the image was getting blurry and unsteady as Jehan picked up his pace. They were almost at the TEC building--just a few blocks away. "And no company should own people like that," Feuilly added quickly. "I've been a bonded worker for three years, and my debt is so big now that TEC owns me for the rest of my life--but over the last few months, I've realized that my friends who are supposed to be independent are no more free than I am. As long as TEC controls what happens to our planet and not the people who live here, then every one of us is a slave.

"So yes, it was worth it. To do something, even something small, to help free a whole planet full of slaves? To try to change my world so that the people I love don't have to live in fear, at TEC's mercy every moment of their lives? It was _absolutely_ worth it--all of it. Even if I had died, it would be worth it." _Even if I died today, it would be worth it--if only I could be out there fighting._

Courfeyrac pounded out the last few words, then stopped to stretch his fingers. "Feuilly, that was really . . . I never thought about it like that. We talk about this whole fight as such a political thing--rights of governance and individual freedom and self-determination. It's easy to get caught up in the words and the ideals and everything and forget that, at the bottom of it all, we're really fighting to protect our friends and our neighbors and the old man who lives at the end of our street. That the Cause . . . it's made out of people. I--" He broke off suddenly, leaning toward the screen, openmouthed.

Jehan had just turned the corner, and the square in front of the TEC headquarters had come into view.

The square was swarming with people. Some were wearing makeshift amor; some had helmets or masks; some had tied strips of red fabric around their arms or the heads as the closest thing to a uniform they could come up with. Some had nothing but the ragged jumpsuits they wore every day to their work in the mines or the refinery plants or the freight yards. They were shouting slogans, waving signs, brandishing rocks and pickaxes and wrenches and homemade explosives--defiant, but not yet fighting. They clustered over on the side of the square opposite the TEC building, a seething mob lapping up against the buildings there.

Then Jehan's view swung toward the TEC building, and Courfeyrac gasped.

TEC's security guards were lined up all the way across the square, an implaccable wall in their uniforms and faceless helmets, bristling with guns and batons. There were dozens of them--hundreds. The feeble rebellion huddled against the other side of the square would have no chance against them.

Enjolras was just visible on the edge of the video frame. As Feuilly watched, he closed his eyes, breathing in deeply as if drawing in the energy of the whole crowd into himself, squaring his shoulders. Then he turned toward Jehan.

"Do you see this?" he asked. His face was radiant--angry and terrible and inexpressibly _happy_. "Look at all the people who've come out today--who won't lie down and let TEC walk all over them anymore. There has to be nearly four hundred people here, don't you think? It's incredible! A few months ago, there were ten of us. Literally, ten. Now there's four hundred, just in this square--and across the city, there are other protests going on, and attacks on TEC's infrastructure. This is so much bigger than a political fight about how the colony should be administered; this is about the rights of people to their own lives, to not be owned by--"

Behind him, the line of black-clad guards took a single step foward, in eerie, silent unison.

The protesters' chants faltered, and they shrank back a little; some of them seemed braced for everything to explode, others seemed ready to run. The guards didn't move, but their stillness seemed more of a threat than a reassurance. On the other side of the square, the crowd was rallying a bit, but the cluster of protesters nearest Jehan had started to unravel, pushing toward the back of the crowd.

"Don't run," Feuilly pleaded. "Hang on. You can do it."

" _Hey TEC!_ " Bahorel bellowed from somewhere just outside the screen. "You wanna hear something? You don't scare me! You're just uniforms on people who should be standing here with us. You're ghosts. You're nothing. Over here--on this side-- _here_ is where everything real is!"

"We are BCA!" Musichetta shouted. "This is our planet! We demand it back!"

"This is our planet!" someone else echoed--and then Enjolras was shouting it too, fierce and terrifying and passionate, shaking the sign he carried at the faceless troops and the indifferent building. The guards took another synchronized step forward, but the tread of their boots on the pavement was barely audible under the shouting. Other people surged forward, filling the video frame, and Feuilly could hear Jehan's voice, crackling in the phone's microphone, shouting along with the others.

Feuilly didn't see where the fighting began--whether it was a protester flinging a stone or a security guard shooting someone--and he didn't see it spread. One moment the square was a tense dichotomy, fury and nervous clamor on one side, ominous stillness on the other, the next the video screen had exploded into violence, the crack of weapons on shields and armor and bone, the image blurry as Jehan scrambled for footing in the press of people.

"No," Courfeyrac whispered. "No, no, no."

Right in front of Jehan, a protester collapsed, one hand at her neck where she'd been shot with one of the same darts that had killed the old man weeks ago, the first time a group of citizens had faced down TEC. Another protester shoved a guard to the ground, wrestling away the club, tearing at the black helmet. Two guards were beating someone else, their black clubs shining wetly.

Somewhere close by, something exploded, filling the square with nasty black smoke (Feuilly didn't know whose that had been, and he wasn't sure it mattered at this point). Someone staggered into the frame, their hair and clothes singed, angry red burns along the side of their face and down one arm. Jehan was coughing, the image jerking wildly and then plummeting to show nothing but a square of pavement as Jehan doubled over, gasping for air.

"Come on, this way," Bahorel's voice said over the chaos. For a minute, things were too quick and blurry to follow, then the video resolved itself to show the boiling edge of the crowd, an alleyway, Bahorel just ahead of Jehan, pulling him out of the press of people into clearer air.

"They're fighting to get inside the building on the other side," Bahorel panted. "If we cut through this way, we can help out, let's--"

They rounded a corner to see a dozen guards running toward them down the alley. Bahorel and Jehan skidded to a halt, and the guards froze too, clearly taken just as much by surprise.

"Well, shit," Bahorel said, and his back was to the camera, but the wry laughter on his face was audible in his voice.

There was a pause. A few of the guards hesitantly raised their guns, glanced toward their leader. The leader nodded.

Jehan took a deep breath. "I believe in--"

The snap of the guns cut him off.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small warning: If you are the kind of person who was upset by the last chapter . . . you might want to hold off a week so you can read chapters 14 and 15 together.

The world spun around Feuilly as the video image pitched and tilted and then came to rest on a shot of the rusted wall of one of the buildings forming the alleyway.

"Oh my god." Courfeyrac was crying, trembling, hands pressed over his mouth. "Oh my god."

Feuilly couldn't take his eyes off the screen, hoping it would start moving again, watching for even the smallest shift that would say there was still hope. The square rusted, pitted metal wall in the frame didn't move.

It took Feuilly a few minutes to realize that it wasn't just him and Courfeyrac watching this screen for movement--Park and the millions of people he was passing their feed on to were watching, too. And right now, that square of metal wall was all the revolution any of them were seeing.

"You have to call someone," Feuilly said, his voice coming out choked and quavery. "Someone needs to pick up the camera, to make sure we keep broadcasting."

Shaking, Courfeyrac nodded. "Okay." He dug in his pocket for his phone. "Who--who even has a phone anymore? We've gone through them so fast, the last few weeks." He took a deep, shuddery breath. "Enjolras. I should call Enjolras."

He dialed the number and he and Feuilly sat in silence, listening to the dial tone. It rang again and again, finally switching to the voice mail. Courfeyrac hung up abruptly and redialed. Again the dial tone trilled--three times . . . six times . . . nine times. Out there in the streets, the phone was ringing in Enjolras's pocket, in the middle of the fighting (or on the pavement of another back alley, or under the fluorescent lights of a TEC hallway, but Feuilly couldn't let himself think about those possibilities). It was just like the unmoving video screen: Things were happening out there, and they were _so close_ to being connected to them, yet they were completely cut off.

"It's loud," Courfeyrac said, his voice tight with the effort to stay casual. "Everybody's shouting. He can't hear it, he probably doesn't notice it vibrating."

Feuilly nodded. "Who else has a phone you can call?"

Courfeyrac shook his head. "We burned Grantaire's phone to set up the connection with Park. Bossuet never got a new one. Bahorel has his--but he-- There's no one else." He ground his teeth in frustration. "They're all out there--Marius and Musichetta and Combeferre and everyone--and they could so easily go get the phone and carry on recording. But they don't know. And we can't get through to them."

Feuilly stood up. His ears were ringing and everything felt very far away--almost like he was about to pass out--but somehow, that made it easier to say the words.

"I'll go."

Courfeyrac's eyes widened. "Are you--"

"We need the connection to the rest of the planets--it's our only chance for this to succeed at all. If we're not taking video of this, TEC gets away with everything. And like you said, you and I are the only people who know where Jehan's phone is."

"So _I_ 'll go, Feuilly, you don't have to--"

"You have to stay here. If we lose the connection with Park, I can't do anything about it. I can't even read what he's saying to us. I have to be the one to go."

"Are you sure you can do it?" Courfeyrac asked quietly.

Feuilly swallowed hard. "I have to."

"Okay." Courfeyrac's voice had gone high and reedy, and he blinked back tears. "Be careful, okay?"

"I--I'm sorry," Feuilly blurted out. "I mean--what you said before, about putting the cause ahead of people, about not thinking about how-- I wish there was a way we could do all this without leaving you alone. I wish I could . . ."

Courfeyrac shook his head. "No, it's okay. Like you said, 'the cause' is made out of people. Caring about people but not standing up for them . . . I guess it doesn't really make sense."

Feuilly quickly hugged Courfeyrac, closing his eyes and trying to fill himself up with the warmth of Courfeyrac's arms around him. Then he pushed himself out the door before he could think about long enough to lose his nerve.

He ran toward the center of the city, his heart already pounding in his ears, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin. _There's no other way_ , he told himself. _It's not just for me anymore--it's for everyone._ His breath came in gasps, and he had to slow to a walk, stumbling along the streets, clutching at the buildings like an old man.

 _Millions of people are watching a square of metal wall,_ he kept reminding himself. _Enjolras and Bossuet and everyone are out there fighting TEC with no one to see._ Somehow, he kept placing one foot in front of the other.

The air was full of smoke, and he could hear shouts and screams up ahead. Before he could fall into a total panic, he turned off into a side street that led away from the TEC building, so he could circle around the back, away from the fighting. One thing at a time; first he just had to get to the camera.

There was something in the air that stung his eyes and made his lungs hurt, and he wished for his mask. He'd had it when he set out the first time--the mask as well as a pair of goggles and arm guards and a bag of fist-sized rocks--and he'd stripped it all off and piled it on the table when he went back, and forgotten it all there in his rush to leave. Now all he had was his bare skin and threadbare clothing, against an enemy that fought with tear gas and bullets. He pulled up his shirt over his mouth and nose and groped along the alleyways.

Half blinded by tears, he almost tripped over Bahorel's body. He'd made it.

It was so strange to see their bodies--so different from looking at Joly's body. Joly had been beaten and bloodied and just looked completely _dead_ ; Jehan looked almost like he could jump up and start walking again, if Feuilly could just wake him up. Bahorel's face was smeared with blood--but it looked like that was just from tangling with someone out in the square. Nothing he hadn't walked off a hundred times before.

"Sorry," Feuilly muttered as he unstrapped the makeshift camera mount from Jehan's chest. He turned it around so he was looking into the lens. "Hi, Courf--hi, Park. I made it. I . . . I'm going to show you Jehan and Bahorel now, if you--if you want to look away, Courf."

He pointed the phone at the bodies, scanning over Bahorel's blankly staring eyes, at Jehan's tangle of limbs, coming in close where the darts stuck out of their skin. Crouching down, he shut their eyes, brushed the hair out of Jehan's face.

It felt wrong to just leave them there, to walk away as if what was lying on the ground there was nothing but a set of discarded clothing. But beyond the end of the alleyway, BCA was falling apart, and Feuilly had to make sure there was a witness.

And after all, all of them might be in the same state by the end of the day.

"Okay," Feuilly said, as much to himself as to those watching on the other end of the video feed. "Here we go."

The alley came out just past the center of the square, on the side opposite the TEC building. To Feuilly's left, the square was mostly empty, except for the discarded signs and bodies of the dead and injured strewn across the ground. The bodies clawed at Feuilly's attention, begging him to look closer, to inspect each corpse to make sure it didn't wear a face he knew. But on the other side of the square, the fighting was still going on, and he made himself look to that side, to search there for the people he so desperately wanted to see among those still living.

He saw Enjolras almost at once. He was standing on an oil drum on the far side of the square, where the protesters had thrown up a makeshift barrier; his hair was a wild halo around his head and his face was streaked with soot and he was shouting as he swung a stolen baton, knocking the TEC guards back with one of their own weapons. Other people were throwing rocks and debris from behind the barricade, and the hail was enough to keep the guards at bay for the moment--but Feuilly could see a knot of black uniforms gathering just around the corner, light glinting off their plexiglas shields. He wanted to yell for Enjolras to be careful, to get _down_ so he wasn't making so much of a target of himself, but Enjolras would never hear him from so far away, with all the noise everywhere.

So instead, he started talking to Park, and to the audience flung across the galaxy--millions of people he didn't know and would never meet, who held the fate of his world in their hands.

"There's Enjolras," he said, hoping he was right to believe in these strangers, to trust that they really were listening. "The one standing up on top of the barrier, with the club. And around the--oh good, someone finally pulled him down--around the corner, you can see the TEC guards getting ready. I'm not sure what they're waiting for; they've got masks, so the tear gas smoke wouldn't be a problem for them. There can't be more coming, can there?"

Holding the phone carefully against his chest to keep the picture as steady as possible, Feuilly climbed onto an overturned packing case to get a better view. "Wait--they're . . . they're leaving." The black figures seemed to be retreating down their alleyway, quickly disappearing from sight around the corner of the building. "I don't understand--why are they--I thought they . . . well, I thought they were winning."

He looked around the square and promising signs began to emerge where before he'd only seen bodies. Enjolras's barricade wasn't by any means the last of the resistance; all across the far side of the square, there were people moving--fighting hand-to-hand with security guards, dragging the wounded to safety, flinging makeshift explosives at the shuttered-up TEC headquarters.

"We're still fighting," Feuilly narrated for Courfeyrac and Park and all their faceless listeners. "We won't go down so easily. Look, there's another barrier right up next to the TEC building; they're using those crates and the corrugated metal to shield themselves so they can get right up next to the doors. And is that--Courf, that's Marius there, right in the middle of it!" Marius's face was almost unrecognizable under the blood and smoke that streaked his features; it was strange to see the same nervous energy that was usually focused on office organization and agonizing over awkward encounters in the street now directed at the task of destroying a door with fire and gunpowder and sheer brute force.

"Bossuet's there, too," Feuilly added, his heart unclenching just a little more as he caught a quick glimpse of the yellow scarf Bossuet had tied around his face that morning. "And I think--it looks like there are some guards, but . . . they're fighting on our side! Look, see those two just to the left of Marius--uh, just past the broken sign--they took off their helmets, and the one has a red armband, but they're still wearing the same armor and boots and everything."

Feuilly felt giddy with excitement and hope. Had the guards who retreated left for the same reason? How many more might be secretly--or now openly--on their side? "But of course--they're people, too, citizens of this planet just like the rest of us. We're fighting for their freedom as well as our own. And of course, some of them would've seen that, _of course_ they--"

The laughter died in his throat as the troop of black uniforms reappeared from a different alleyway, headed directly toward Marius's barricade.

He watched it unfold, sick with horror, and could do nothing. The protesters saw the approaching guards now and began swarming around their too-fragile shelter. Some of them brandished weapons; others peeled off to run back to Enjolras's larger stronghold. The guards came on. Bossuet went down in the first clash, but Feuilly couldn't see what had happened to him. The protesters' rocks and pickaxes and shovels took down the first rank of the TEC guards, but the second rank stepped in to take their place, and there were so many more behind them. Even as the fighting went on around the barriers, Feuilly could see guards calmly pulling off one piece after another, slowly dismantling the barricade.

Then Marius was standing above them all, holding something over his head. It was one of Bahorel's devices with the wires and tubing and different bottles of fluids. A few of the fighters drew back as they saw what he held; most didn't even notice as Marius flipped a lever and then heaved the device into the thick of the snarl of fighters pressed against the doors of the TEC building.

Some moments later, Feuilly found himself on the ground, his ears ringing. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the way the ground tilted wildly, and looked around.

The other side of the square was a smoking crater.

The small barricade was gone--or rather, it was scattered across the square in charred splinters. The people around it, both defenders and assailants, had disappeared as well. Limp bodies lay around the edges of the crater, among scraps of bloody clothing and body parts torn and burnt past identification. As Feuilly watched, horrified, some of the bodies started to move, shaking and twisting in pain. Many others did not.

Belatedly, Feuilly remembered the camera. The phone's case had been cracked in the explosion, but it seemed to still be working--the screen lit up when he pressed buttons, at least. So he picked it up and panned across the square. He tried to give some narration for Park's benefit, but he kept losing his train of thought, his tongue tripping over itself, and finally he fell silent, letting the bloody street tell its own story.

Marius had done this, Feuilly thought numbly--quiet, apologetic Marius. The man who'd spent the whole spring fretting about whether the cute technician at his office had noticed the holes in his pants had just blown himself up--along with dozens of his compatriots and enemies--for his planet's freedom.

And he hadn't thrown his life away for nothing. Not only were the guards who'd been attacking the barrier just as decimated as the defenders, the TEC building had taken serious damage from the blast as well. The heavy iron doors were still hanging in their frame, but the metal was seriously buckled, and part of the wall next to them had been completely blown in. Even if the doors' locks were intact, the protesters could climb right into the building through the wall--if there was anybody left to do so.

And there was: The other barricade--the one where Feuilly had seen Enjolras before--was still mostly intact. A shout came from behind it, and a moment later a pack of ragged fighters, blurry forms through all the smoke, flung themselves onto the gash in the TEC building.

A few of the guards had staggered to their feet by this time, and some trained their guns on the protesters. But just as many were limping away from the fighting. The first of the protesters disappeared inside the building (Feuilly thought he saw the gold flash of Enjolras's hair for just an instant). Others were close on their heels, some running, others limping determinedly.

"We're inside," Feuilly said, disbelieving. His hands were trembling with excitement and nerves and who knew what else, and he clutched the camera to his chest in an attempt to keep the picture steady. "I'll try to follow, if I can, so you can see what happens. There isn't so much to see out here." He started to jog across the square, weaving a little unsteadily between the wreckage left from the earlier fighting and Marius's bomb, his sense of balance still a little off.

A moment later, the fresh division of guards emerged from the street behind Feuilly.

Caught between TEC's troops and its headquarters, Feuilly had nowhere to go. The alley he'd come from was full of black uniforms; the square in front of him was wide enough to give them ample time to shoot him down if he tried to run; everything was open and blasted bare of any cover. Feuilly froze, an animal caught by surprise, and by the time he'd collected himself enough to think of trying to escape, the first few guards had run up to confront him.

"What's that?" one barked, motioning at the phone Feuilly still clutched to his chest. "Is that--"

"Relax, Si, it's just a phone," another one told him, snatching it from Feuilly's hand. He tossed the phone to his companion and wrenched Feuilly's arm behind his back. "Should we lock him up with the others or just take care of him here?"

"Captain said--"

"Hang on," the first guard said. "It looks like this is transmitting. Why would he--wait, the camera--"

"What's going on here?" One of the guards shoved Feuilly with gloved hands while another held Feuilly's arms behind his back. "What are you doing with the phone?"

Other shouted questions rang in Feuilly's ears; he saw the glare of fluorescent lights overhead. The copper tang of terror filled his mouth. In a surge of panic, he wrenched himself out of the guards' grip, the pop in his shoulder barely registering; he shoved past them and ran for the edge of the square.

It was several minutes later and several blocks away that he collapsed, lungs heaving, in the corner between two rusted buildings and realized that he was still alive. And he was free. There were no pounding feet behind him, no guns trained on him from the end of the street. He was not going back to that basement room.

As soon as the terror had ebbed a bit, Feuilly felt a bit of shame, or at least regret, at having run away from the center of the action--and just when the most important things were happening. Even now, Enjolras and the other remaining fighters might be spilling TEC's secrets to the galaxy over the corporation's own networks, or taking out their communications, or destroying the servers that held the records of all the bonded workers' debts. Or they might be holed up in an office, cut off from everyone else, making a brave last stand with no one to see. Either way, nobody was watching now.

Of course, Feuilly hadn't had a choice; he'd been caught by the TEC guards, and if he hadn't run he'd be dead or captured and Park wouldn't be getting any footage from him anyway. Still, it was sad that the people of the other planets wouldn't see the end of the story.

Or would they? Feuilly recalled that the phone had still been on when the guards took it from him. If they hadn't realized what it was--if they hadn't shut it off--it might still be working. They could be carrying it with them wherever they went next, unwittingly continuing Feuilly's mission for him. Maybe the phone was inside the TEC headquarters now, recording from the guards' point of view whatever was going on in there, transmitting all that footage across the city to Courfeyrac's apartment.

Courfeyrac.

A cold sweat broke out over Feuilly's skin as he remembered what Enjolras had told him the day he took the phone to the refinery: _Don't let them take the phone . . . we can track the signal._

And it went both ways.

He scrambled up off the ground and took off at a run.

  
  


Feuilly ran until his lungs were on fire and the pain in his side had him half doubled up as he raced along the alleys. But as soon as he turned the corner onto Courfeyrac's street, his hopes of getting there first--of warning Courfeyrac before TEC got there--crumbled.

The door to the housing unit had been kicked open; a single panel hung crookedly from the one remaining hinge. Feuilly slowed, looking around nervously, but all was quiet, and there was no sign of movement inside. The guards must have already come and gone.

Inside, the unit had been torn apart. Furniture had been thrown around the room; the computer had been smashed and its electronic guts scattered across the floor; the bookshelf had been knocked over, spilling out books and papers. Some of the pages were spotted with blood.

 _Okay, it's not the end,_ Feuilly thought as he leaned, gasping for breath, against the doorframe. _They found a way to get me out of TEC's hands, we can do it again._ A dissenting thought flickered through his mind--Bahorel, who had made the bomb that got Feuilly out, was dead, and who knew who else was as well--but he pushed it away. _We can make this okay, we can--_

Then his eyes fell on the hand flung out from underneath the desk.

Courfeyrac was lying there curled up, one arm over his head, as if he'd been trying to protect himself. It hadn't worked. There was blood in his hair from a gaping wound just over one ear, blood running down his face, blood--too much of it--pooled under his head.

Feuilly fell to his knees beside him. Hands shaking, he pulled off his shirt and wadded it up against Courfeyrac's head--more to hide the ugly wound than in hopes of stopping the bleeding. With his free hand, Feuilly felt for a pulse, pressing cold fingers to Courfeyrac's outflung wrist. There was a heartbeat. But it was very weak.

Feuilly felt hollowed out, empty except for the single, screaming thought that looped through his brain: _Please. Please, just this once._

Courfeyrac's eyelids fluttered for a moment, and Feuilly caught his breath. But his eyes stayed closed, his skin very pale under the streaks of blood so fresh it hadn't even darkened to brown.

"Courf?" Feuilly said. No response. "Courfeyrac, hang on. I'm here; you're going to be okay."

He scanned the rest of his friend's body. There were gashes on Courfeyrac's arms and his nose looked like it might be broken, but none of his injuries seemed serious compared to the head wound. His breathing was uneven, and so shallow that Feuilly could barely see his chest rising and falling.

"You're going to be okay," he said again, but his throat tightened around the words. "Please," he begged, clutching Courfeyrac's limp hand. "Hang on. You can't--you have to--"

Tears were running down his cheeks. He pressed his fingers again to Courfeyrac's wrist, felt the pulse there flutter weakly--and then go still. And then one more faint heartbeat. Feuilly's own heart was like a black hole in his chest.

"Please," he whispered, his vision blurry with tears. "Don't leave me."

Feuilly had lived twenty-two years in this universe--long enough to know that you didn't always get the things you needed, that hoping was just asking to get hurt, that people _always_ went away. It was a lesson he'd learned well as he'd watched it play out over and over again. His father, his mother, Lark, hi friends on Gideon, Absolon, Joly--everyone went away sooner or later. He'd seen enough of the world to know that he had no right to expect special treatment from life, or to ask for any extra luck.

Here in St. Denis, with Courfeyrac and Bossuet and the others, he'd almost forgotten. He'd met people who really seemed to care about him, who'd risked themselves to make him safe, who didn't want to go away. He'd learned to open up to them as if they weren't just temporary acquaintances, and had even started to hope that maybe, _maybe . . ._

_Maybe he'd find someone who wouldn't leave him._

He should have known that even if someone was willing--somehow--to stay with him, the universe would still take them away. The universe was huge and cold and dark and it didn't care about dreams, or revolutions, or choked whispers in the wreckage of a ravaged prefab housing pod.

Under his fingers, Courfeyrac's wrist was cold and still.

 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has stuck with this monster of a story through the deaths of everyone you love--and especially to everyone who left kudos and comments! A small confession: I post updates on Sunday nights because I have a really stressful job, and knowing that there might be comments on the latest chapter gives me one good thing to wake up to on Monday mornings. So your kind words have really been so important to me through a very challenging time, and seriously I am so, so grateful to all of you. <3
> 
> [Also, one little warning: There's medical stuff in this chapter--not hospitals but serious breathing problems. Just fyi.]

The revolution was crushed that afternoon, but the city burned for days. After they killed all the fighters remaining in the square and in the headquarters building, TEC began to systematically go through the city sector by sector, rooting out insurgents who'd gone to ground. They broke down doors, dragged people out into the streets, tore through their possessions. Hundreds of people were taken away for questioning or simply shot down in the streets--many more than had ever signed their names to petitions or attended planning meetings or ever shouted one angry word at a TEC building.

To keep people from fleeing from one sector to another ahead of the purge, TEC cut the city into pieces. Gates that had been installed by the first colonists as a fail-safe in case dangerous local fauna got into the settlement--and then forgotten by everyone when the planet turned out not to have particularly dangerous animals--were closed, cutting the sectors off from each other. Roadblocks appeared at the end of every street, an ironic echo of the barricades the protesters had thrown up days earlier. People starved in their houses for fear of getting shot going out to get food.

BCA was completely cut off. The planet's connection to the intersystem internet had been shut down again, so there was no way to call for help or to find out what was happening in the rest of the galaxy. The inner planets might be all up in arms against TEC and its abuses, petitioning the intersystem authorities to take action against it--or they might have forgotten all about the trivial outbreaks of violence on a little underdeveloped colony planet.

For the people on the surface of BCA, it hardly mattered. Even the fastest ship would take two weeks to reach BCA from the inner planets, and by that time TEC would have decimated the entire city. The official records, already being written, would state that there had been excessive looting and violence during the protests, and that keeping the peace had required an unfortunate loss of life. The very images of protesters throwing rocks and launching explosives at the TEC buildings that had been transmitted to the inner planets would be entered into the records as proof of the populace's disorderly conduct, of the need for firm action to preserve the common good. There was nothing stopping TEC's hand--with the planet upgraded to Class-VR and thousands of new bonded laborers already en route for the minefields, every free worker they killed was one less competitor for the copper.

For days, the Colonial Authority offices remained dark, their doors locked tight.

In a hovel deep in the heart of the Five Bolts neighborhood, Grantaire, Ep, and Feuilly waited for the fire to reach them.

Grantaire had been the one to find Feuilly, to drag him out of the ruined apartment, to pull him through the falling night away from the sounds of gunshots and screams. They made it to the southwest sector of the city just an hour before the gates slammed shut. Feuilly, stumbling blindly along next to Grantaire, too worn out with exhaustion and grief to care where they went, let Grantaire lead him through the narrow, garbage-filled streets to the place Ep had showed him earlier that day.

It was a standard prefab unit, one of the ones from the second wave of colonization drops, with the rubber seals that crumbled with dry-rot after a few decades. In the northeast of the city, a unit this size might house one medium-size family, or two couples. This building was split between the home and office of a back-alley dentist and his wife and five children on one side, and a small clutch of service workers and their pimp on the other. A sheet of cardboard divided the two businesses, and a plastic tarp taped up on the service workers' side created a tiny triangular closet where Ep, Grantaire, and Feuilly huddled for five days. It was a place she'd used before, she told them, when she needed get out of sight for a little while; she didn't elaborate. The pimp owed her a favor--not a favor worth permanent lodging, but the debt would last them a week or so, until they could figure something else out.

Nobody said anything, but they weren't sure Ep would last that week. At first glance, she looked fine--she didn't even have the bruises and scrapes Grantaire and Feuilly did--but one of TEC's smoke bombs had exploded a few feet from her face, and the chemicals she'd breathed in had burned her lungs. Grantaire had had to carry her on his back most of the way to her hideout, and now she could barely sit up. There was a rattling sound when she breathed, and though she was breathing quickly, almost hyperventilating, she said it felt like she was never getting enough air. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and her lips and fingernails were starting to take on a bluish tinge.

As they sat in the darkness trying to ignore Ep's rattling breathing and the cries coming from either side of their closet, Grantaire and Feuilly pieced together the tally of their friends.

"There wasn't time to check everyone's housing," Grantaire said. "And I know the odds aren't good, but there _could_ be another group of us, gone to ground somewhere else in the city. I don't know for sure about everyone, there might . . . Bahorel and Jehan, for example."

Feuilly's voice was dull. "They're dead. I saw it happen. On the video feed."

"Well." Grantaire searched for words for a minute. "Maybe not, then. I think that's--yeah. I guess I know about everyone, then."

"Bossuet?" Feuilly made himself ask, dreading the answer.

Grantaire shook his head. "Shot." He sighed heavily. "I saw most of it happen. Bossuet was killed; Musichetta was killed; Combeferre was killed; Marius, I didn't see it exactly but there was no way he walked away from that bomb."

"Enjolras went into the TEC building after the bomb."

"I know." Grantaire rubbed his eyes. "I saw him go, I--I almost followed him in. But . . . Ep was in trouble, and then there was this other guy, I didn't know him, but his leg was broken and I was helping him get away, and . . . god, Feuilly, did I abandon the people I loved for someone whose name I didn't even know?"

Feuilly felt so empty, he didn't know where he could find any comfort to pull out for Grantaire. "They killed everyone who went into the building," he said finally; it was the best he could come up with. "You would be dead."

Grantaire nodded. "I know, there wouldn't be any point to it; nothing would have turned out differently just because I was there. I just . . . I hope he didn't die alone, you know?"

Feuilly shook his head trying to drive away the image: Enjolras alone and cornered in a bare, windowless hallway, gunned down among cubicles and server boxes under the harsh fluorescent lights.

"That would be the worst thing," Grantaire continued. "The inner planets forgot about us, and most of the people in the city just shut their doors, and after all that, to be standing there at the end of it all without even a friend at his side--and I keep thinking, I could have changed that. I couldn't save the revolution, or make the rest of the galaxy give a shit about BCA, or any of that. But I could have saved him from dying alone."

"Ep would be dead," Feuilly said. "If you'd followed him. And so would I. If you hadn't been there to get me out of Courfeyrac's apartment, I just would've stayed there." _I'm not sure that's worth much,_ he added internally.

But Grantaire sniffled and nodded. "Enjolras would be happy you made it through," he said. "That someone lived on to tell what happened."

The thought of trying to put any of that day into words, trying to recount his friends' deaths for a faraway, faceless journalist like Park, was such a crushing prospect, Feuilly just shook his head. Maybe someday it would happen; he wouldn't rule it out. But it didn't seem likely.

He didn't feel happy to have survived, not really. There was a very simple, animal part of him that was singing with adrenaline and relief at finding itself still moving and breathing--but beyond the physical, he just felt . . . empty. Like his insides had been torn apart one too many times, and now nothing was left. He knew he _could_ pick up and move on, even if it didn't feel like it at the moment; he could start over like he had so many times in the past. But it seemed like so much hard work, and what was the point?

 

 

On the fourth night their world burned, Ep woke up for the last time.

It was hard to see the difference, at first; she didn't have the energy to move much, so it was just her eyes, wandering around their little closet. They had propped her up against some boxes and a wadded-up sheet of plastic because her breathing had seemed marginally easier that way, earlier that day. Now it didn't seem to make any difference at all.

Even though it was late, a few hours past midnight, Feuilly was awake--both to keep watch over Ep and because their borrowed space had only enough room for two of them to lie down at a time, and it was Grantaire's turn to sleep. He met her eyes and tried to smile, although the half-controlled panic in them made it difficult. He remembered again the time when the air filtration system on Gideon had gone out, those panicked few days trying to coax the decades-old equipment back to life, feeling the air get worse and knowing that their slow suffocation had already begun. Unable to do anything more, he squeezed Ep's hand, and her fingers twitched weakly in return.

"Do . . . we have . . . any water?" she rasped, pausing after every few words to catch enough of a breath for the next ones.

"A little bit. Here." He held the bottle to her lips. She took a few sips, coughed weakly, and nudged his hand away.

"Can you eat something?" Feuilly asked. Ep shook her head, which was just as well; they were down to two protein cakes, without a clear plan for how to get more. As far as parts of the city to be trapped in went, this neighborhood was a good one. The TEC presence was fairly minimal (even now, with everything going on, the guards were mostly avoiding this area), and there were plenty of black-market shops where you could get food and other supplies outside the TEC credit system. But that required having something to trade for them, and they had nothing but the clothes on their backs.

"I have--" She coughed again. "Something . . . for you." She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. With shaking hands, she pressed it into Feuilly's hand. "Go here . . . after."

Feuilly unfolded the paper and saw a short scrawled line, a mix of text and pictographs that he recognized as an address.

"I do write . . . you know," Ep said, with the ghost of a smile. She waved a hand at the paper. "He's . . . a sneaky devil . . . He'll . . . get you out." She closed her eyes, letting her head fall back against the plastic sheeting. "Just . . . promise you'll wait . . . with me. Until it's . . . over."

Feuilly squeezed her hand. "Of course. We're staying with you--as long as you need us." What else could he say? _You're not going to die_ was such an obvious lie, to speak it would just be an insult.

"Sorry," she whispered, after a pause.

Feuilly frowned. "For what?"

"I should've . . . told you sooner. I wanted . . . to keep it in the past . . . pretend it never happened." Her eyes flickered open. "But that . . . meant I was still . . . a liar . . . just as shitty as before. I've been . . . trying . . . to be better." She patted his hand that held the address. "Guess . . . this is as good . . . as I'm . . . going to get."

Her eyes fell closed, and she slept for a while; Feuilly listened, unable to do anything to help, as she struggled to draw each breath.

After two hours, she stopped struggling.

 

 

The dentist pulled out her teeth, and the pimp gave her body to a man with a cart in exchange for a small package wrapped in black plastic. Feuilly and Grantaire tried to stop them, but they were strangers in the district, penniless and weaponless--and what would they have done with the body, anyway? Taking it to a TEC-operated incinerator was out of the question, even if they'd known where the nearest one was. The dentist muttered something about a rent payment as he wrenched Ep's teeth out, and the pimp just laughed in their faces at their protests.

As the cart rattled down the street and they turned to follow the man back inside their temporary shelter, he barred their way in with one arm.

"She was a friend of a friend," he said. "You guys, I don't know who you are."

"A friend of a friend of a friend?" Grantaire ventured, but the man didn't echo his hopeful smile.

"You want the space, you pay," he said. "I can use that spot for another girl--or for you, if you want," he added, looking Feuilly up and down. "Not you," he told Grantaire flatly. "Maybe down at Inches, you could. But nobody here is that desperate." And he shut the door in their faces.

"Okay then," Grantaire said. "I guess--no, it's probably not safe to try to get to my apartment. All my stuff's got to be confiscated or stolen by now anyway. Maybe it's time to see if that dentist fellow's interest extends to the teeth of living people." He flashed a sour grin. "And then I'm thinking our best bet is to use whatever money we get to buy up some protein cakes and then try to get out of the city altogether; maybe we loop around and see if there's anything left at the farm, if it's safe to go there. And then out into the hills. Bahorel always was so sure it was possible to live off the land here; I guess we'll find out if he was right or not."

"There . . . _is_ another option," Feuilly said. He told Grantaire about the address Ep had given him, the vague hope sounding less and less like a Plan and more like wishful thinking with every word. It was a scrap of paper with a few scribbled characters, and a dying woman's vague promise of help. Even Grantaire's risky plan to survive in the wilderness seemed more solid.

But the worse the chance sounded in his ears, the more he felt like he had to convince Grantaire to take it with him. He found himself babbling a bit, almost pleading: "I know you probably have a better chance leaving the city and going up into the hills, and if you want to do that, that's okay--but there's at least a possibility that this could work. And I guess I trust Ep, I didn't always but she proved herself over and over, and I feel like I owe it to her to take her seriously this last time--and I, I really don't know if I can handle being alone right now so maybe--do you want to come with me?"

Feuilly broke off, breathless, and realized Grantaire was grinning wryly. "Ah yes, how could I resist the intrigue? A mysterious address and some dude who Ep describes as 'a sneaky devil'--which, coming from her . . . well, that's saying a lot. How could I _possibly_ say no to this amazing opportunity?" Feuilly felt his face grow hot, but Grantaire suddenly turned serious. "Of _course_ I'm coming with you. What, did you think I would just abandon the one friend I have left in this city? If you think Ep's mystery man is our best bet, let's do it."

 

 

The address was a battered little unit--one of the clunky first-generation things, smaller than later generations, but still fairly solid--near the southernmost city limits. It took Feuilly and Grantaire most of the day to reach it, creeping carefully through the smallest alleyways, trying to keep a lookout for both TEC guards and the desperate people of this district, loitering in the corners of shops as patrols passed, going in huge several-block loops to find a way around the roadblocks. The sun was sinking over the city by the time they finally stood in front of the dull metal door, and Feuilly was acutely aware that, if this didn't play out, this was not exactly a safe place to spend a night.

Grantaire checked the smudged paper one more time. "Yep, this is it." He brushed at the dust on his clothes and ran a hand through his hair, doing absolutely nothing to improve his disreputable appearance. Feuilly straightened his torn jacket, took a deep breath, and knocked.

After a long pause, the door opened a handspan, and a young woman's face looked out at them, wariness mixing with curiosity in her expression.

"Um." Feuilly swallowed. "A friend--Ep--gave us this address. She said--there was someone here who could help us."

"Help you with what?" the woman asked, her dark eyes narrowing.

"Getting out of the city, I think? Sorry, I don't know exactly what she had in mind; she didn't have a lot of time to explain."

"What did you say your friend's name was?"

"Ep, um . . . Jondrette. Small woman, kind of brown hair . . . really skinny . . ."

He broke off, distracted from his floundering description by something nagging in the back of his mind. There was something familiar about the woman's face. Something in her eyes . . . the tilt of her head . . .

He knew her.

At the same moment, her eyes widened, and she let the door open a little farther. "Wait. Are you . . . Feuilly?"

Feuilly was crying, but Lark was too as she flung her arms around his neck, chattering through her tears. "Oh my god, Feuilly, you're okay; you're _okay_." She pulled back, touching his face, his hair. "You're okay," she repeated again, reverent as a prayer.

"I never thought I'd--" Feuilly managed, laughing at crying at once.

"Me neither," she said, hugging him again. "Oh, Feuilly, I missed you _so much_ , I worried about you for years and years, what happened to you, how did you get here, how did you know I was--Oh." She blinked. "But of course, it was Eponine. She told you we were here. Ah, she is _so good_ , I'm so grateful to her--where is she?"

He shook his head. "She's dead. She--just gave me the address."

Lark's face grew somber. "I'm so sorry."

"Everyone's dead," Feuilly found himself sobbing. "Bossuet's dead, Courfeyrac's dead, Enjolras, Combeferre, everyone. They're gone. We tried to change things, but we weren't strong enough, and now they're all dead, and--and--"

Lark's arms were around him again. "But _you're_ not dead," she said. "I thought about you for years and years and I finally knew I would never see you again, and that you might as well be dead to me--but here you are, and I'm so, _so_ happy." She started to sob again, clutching Feuilly's shoulders like she would never let go.

A voice called from somewhere inside the house. "Cosette? What's going on?" A moment later, a tall man loomed in the doorway, frowning. "Why did you open the door? You know it's dangerous in the city right now, why didn't you--" He broke off at the sight of Feuilly and Lark crying and laughing helplessly on each others' shoulders. Lark tried to explain but she couldn't make herself understood. The man shared a bewildered look with Grantaire as they waited for Feuilly and Lark to collect themselves.

"Papa," Lark gasped finally. "This is Feuilly. You remember."

"The boy from Gideon." His eyes widened. "That's . . . a chance in a billion."

"Eponine told him where we lived," she said. "I--please don't be angry--I've met her a few times. She didn't tell her father, I know she wouldn't."

As if startled into activity, the man looked up and down the street. "We shouldn't be standing outside. Come in, Feuilly--and . . ."

"Grantaire," Grantaire supplied, a bemused smile playing on his lips. "One of Feuilly's friends--and apparently, out of all of us, the one most in the dark about . . . all this." He motioned at the crying pair and laughed. "But it seems like a good thing."

Feuilly nodded. "Lark is my . . . my old friend."

"Sister," Lark corrected. She pulled him to his feet, but didn't let go her firm grip on his hand. "That's what I used to pretend, at least."

"Me too," Feuilly admitted. "She was . . . we lost each other when we were young. I never thought I'd see her again."

"That much is apparent," Grantaire laughed.

"Come _inside_ ," Lark's father insisted. "This city is a dangerous place, these last few days."

"Oh, don't we know it," Grantaire said dryly.

After the explanations, after the telling of old memories Feuilly had thought he'd never tell again, after more tears, after the first hot meal Feuilly and Grantaire had tasted in days, they started to make plans.

"Cosette and I have been planning on leaving Beta Caeli A for a few weeks now," her father--Valjean--explained to Feuily and Grantaire. "For--reasons other than the political unrest. We'd actually planned to leave last week, but when the violence broke out we decided to wait a few days. But I have my ship in the port, and I've bribed an official to let us take off two days from now. You're welcome to come with us, of course. We'll figure out a way to get you through the city and onto the ship without getting caught. It shouldn't be a problem." He shrugged, like someone who'd eluded corporate guards dozens of times and found it more a frustrating annoyance than an actual threat at this point.

"You _will_ come with us, won't you?" Lark pleaded, and Grantaire laughed.

"You don't have to beg; we don't have any other choice. It's us who should be begging you!" Then his face fell. "It's too bad, though . . . quitting on BCA, after everyone who fought and died for its freedom. We--you--put so many months of work into trying to make this a better planet, and now we're just walking away. Enjolras would be disappointed," he added quietly.

"We can come back," Lark pointed out. "It doesn't have to be forever. Look at us--Papa and I haven't been on Beta Caeli A this whole time; we spent _years_ out in different systems, and only just came back to the Beta Caeli system two years ago. You can leave for a little while--and then come back, when it's safe."

"And what we were fighting for . . . it's not just about BCA," Feuilly said slowly. "That's what we talked about, I know--'I believe in BCA,' all that. But like Park told us, this kind of thing is happening all over the galaxy."

He thought about his own family, generations back, who must have lived somewhere bad enough that it made even the new provisional colony on Gideon seem like an honest chance. "Everywhere, the Colonial Authority and corporations like TEC are exploiting people, and getting away with it because they're so big that nobody dares stand up to them--and because they control the communication networks so nobody tells the stories of the people on the bottom. That's a fight that's so much bigger than BCA. So no matter where we go, we can carry on the cause that Enjolras and Courfeyrac and Joly and Bossuet--that they all died to--" He broke off, his voice all ragged.

In the awkward silence that followed as Feuilly wiped his eyes and tried to pull himself together again, Grantaire spoke up. "So, Valjean, do you sing tenor?"

Valjean frowned in confusion. "N-no? What is that?"

Grantaire shrugged. "I don't know, exactly. It's just something that a good friend of mine used to ask when he met new people. It's a very old style of singing, I guess--I've never heard it, but he used to rave about it, how amazing it was, and I always wondered what it sounded like. So I thought, 'well, here's a new person, maybe he knows it.'"

"I'm sorry," Valjean said, a bit discomfited. "I've never heard of it."

"Ah well, don't worry. It's a big star system--"

"Galaxy," Valjean corrected. "We're not staying in the Beta Caeli system, you know."

"Oh." Grantaire's eyes widened. "Wow. Okay. Well, it's a big _galaxy_ \--and surely there's _someone_ out there who sings tenor. We're bound to find them someday--right, Feuilly?"

Despite Bossuet's tireless questioning of everyone he met, Feuilly had never heard tenor singing, other than Bossuet's amateur imitation of it. It was an ancient art form, thousands of years old, dating back--if Bossuet was right--to Old Terra, to the days before the planet's poisoned atmosphere had scorched out all its life. After all that time, the fact that Bossuet had even met _one_ person who still remembered that kind of singing had been a huge stroke of luck, and the odds of repeating it were probably very small.

On the other hand . . . Feuilly had said goodbye to Lark forever fifteen years ago, written her off as as good as dead, and here she was sitting next to him: living proof that sometimes, every once in a while, even the biggest odds could be beaten.

Feuilly thought about the galaxy--stars upon stars upon stars, for thousands of light years in every direction. There were a hundred trillion people out there, each of them going through their own difficult, terrifying, beautiful life. There were people mining the hard rock of moons like Gideon; people transporting protein cakes and mechanical parts and human goods from planet to planet; people overseeing the whole process from colonial and corporate offices; people eking out a precarious existence outside the system as independent miners and smugglers; people who were just living parts in the vast machinery as they dragged ore up refinery towers or marched out in black armor to crush a riot--and even a few people standing up to fight against it all.

Somewhere in all that, there might be a singer still performing the ancient songs in the old style. Someday, they might meet them.

Anything could happen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on tumblr at takethewatch. Come say hi! Or yell at me about my "poor idealistic tragedy children" as Julia calls them. Either one, really! ^_^

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Orestes Fasting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6999814) by [talefeathers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers)




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